It’s not the size of the board that counts for this Asus mobo...
Good excuses to use silly clichés aside, ASUS has long been useful for another purpose. Namely they've been consistently good at making motherboards with features you don't really see anywhere else, and it usually get its boards out first. The mobo we're looking at is the Rampage II Gene, and if this board were a person it'd be missing more than a few chromosomes when compared to a fullsized model. In reality however this pint-sized rampant scamp packs in all the features we love about X58 into a much smaller size.
Being the X58-chipsetted wonder we know and love grants this mobo the capabilities for Crossfire and SLI, both more than capable of running on this board's two full-length PCIe slots. There's also a PCI slot for wireless! Nestled underneath the black and red aluminium heatsink is where we find this chipset, and it is connected to the power regulation via a nickel-plated heatpipe. The logo isn't lit up on the chipset (thankfully), but there are indicator LEDs around the chipset, CPU and memory to show theoretical load.
The CPU socket is a great piece of work, with a decent amount of space around it for coolers and capacity for both LGA1366 <i>and</i> LGA775 heatsinks to be used - very handy for a smaller build. A full complement of DDR3 slots are handy for a huge amount of memory (up to 12GB), though keep clearance in mind for sticks sporting tall heatsinks.
The BIOS battery is upended and stands tall at the top-right of the board, while the 24-pin and 8-pin power connectors are in the best placement. Right next to the 8-pin (top-left) is a header for the included LCD post screen. IDE is included next to the DDR3 slots, and a series of six right-angled SATA ports along the edge of the board - one extra vertical port is also there. Front panel connectors are standard, along with USB headers, Firewire and audio all along the bottom.
A large power button labelled 'Start', with another smaller reset button next to it are handy, while a hardware MemOK button makes sure the memory is functioning correctly. The small silver plate at the bottom-left of the board says X-Fi on it proudly (though as our gallery link above shows this is actually just a standard onboard chip). Not that you'll ever need to use it, but there is a quick-swap BIOS at the bottom of the board; leave this alone unless you know what you're doing, though.
Five fan headers are dotted around the edges of the board, and are phenomenally useful for keeping the board cool - we recorded incredibly toasty temps on the Northbridge of 66 degrees Celsius, and a whopping 80 degrees on the Southbridge. The BIOS seems to want to slow things down when temps get to 100, but we definitely don't suggest leaving these without airflow.
I/O options are great for such a small mobo too, with six USB, a single PS/2, Firewire, eSATA, Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, Optical and a Clear CMOS button. All these features being crammed into a small board is impressive, but we wanted to know just how far it'd overclock. The answer is - pretty well. We managed to get it to our third level preset, but the heat on the NB/SB was too great to get past 160 QPI. This isn't a bad result though - considering it's such a small board, that it can overclock at all is still quite impressive.
ASUS has a definite winner with this miniaturised mobo, and we've used it to great effect in this very mag (check out the Tutorials section for more) - good work ASUS!
Issue: 133 | February, 2012