ASUS delivers us the over-achieving youngest sibling of the Rampage family - and it's a corker of a motherboard!
The X58 chipset has been a mainstay in enthusiast performance for nigh-on two years now, launching with Nehalem in late 2008. Though the chipset itself hasn't changed, it has been integrated in a huge number of designs over the past two years. Arguably most useful of these is the mATX form factor: a cut-down fullsize ATX design that retains most useful features while sacrificing only board real estate (and losing a chunk of that price tag, too). The Gene is the direct descendant of the Rampage III Extreme, and everything from the colour scheme to the chipset cooling remains the same.
Retained is the LGA1366 socket that, though it will be replaced sometime next year, is still the current high-end choice. It's surrounded by an 8-phase power delivery system which proved very reliable in testing, neither overheating nor allowing voltage settings to waver much from the intended amount. Due to the limited space available the socket is quite close to the VRM and Northbridge chipset coolers, though most aftermarket heatsinks and waterblocks should work just fine.
The Gene supports six DDR3 slots that are equipped with an exclusive dual-phase power system; this proved very satisfying when serving up memory bandwidth results. In part this stems from a mature BIOS, but it's significantly improved compared to the higher-end Rampage III Extreme. The 24- and 8-pin power connectors are placed at the edges of the board for neat cabling, with the CMOS battery has been raised vertically at the top-right edge of the board, a nice space saving measure.
Storage ports on offer are typical of a high-end board, and two SATA3 ports that are run off the Marvell chip complement the six SATA2 ports nicely. They're also right-angled to aid cabling in cramped conditions.
The ICH10R Southbridge chipset lies in its usual place in the bottom-right corner of the board, though the small heatsink that's been applied is insufficient for optimal cooling at overclocked frequencies, and it became noticeably hot under load.
Below the Southbridge chip lays hard power/reset buttons and a very handy clear CMOS button, alongside the usual USB and front panel headers. There's no support for legacy devices, with Floppy and IDE connectors absent. This isn't really a must-have feature, and won't be missed.
The expansion slots hold most of this board's promise, able to supply two graphics cards with dual 16x PCIe 2.0 bandwidth, also boasting Crossfire and SLI support. Included alongside these slots is what ASUS calls a 'SupremeFX X-Fi 2' that supposedly provides "ultra-real cinematic in-game surround sound". In reality this is a standard onboard audio chip and a piece of software that emulates good audio, which in reality gives you merely okay audio.
The performance of the Gene is very nice, and it manages to compete with its older brother across all our stock benchmarks. A quick foray into the neat BIOS delivers overclocks at OC1 and OC2 easily, returning scores that are competitive with other high-end motherboards. We manually pushed the board further than this, reaching a maximum stable QPI speed of 174MHz, giving a final clock of 4.35GHz and a Cinebench result of 25550. Interestingly the board barely scraped a QPI speed of 168MHz at the BIOS it shipped at (0501), but an easy update (0603) unlocked extra headroom.
For an mATX board that supports most features enthusiasts are after, the Gene is a nice choice that saves you $200 compared to its older brother. And really, there's not much else you'd need in a board.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012