Asus Rampage II Gene Review

Asus Rampage II Gene

Manufacturer: Asus
UK Price (as Reviewed): £172.70 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as Reviewed): $249.99 (ex. Tax)

Another week and another small form factor board hits our test benches! Asus' Gene range isn't limited to its P45 series - there is significant interest in LGA1366, X58 and Core i7 too, because it affords far greater performance and the i7-920 is currently a good buy in terms of price and performance.

The Rampage II Gene is a micro-ATX board extending from the full-size desktop Rampage II line of Core i7 boards. It doesn't quite carry over all the features you get on the ATX boards, but it's still a Republic of Gamers model, and so it's still rather special, and of course, rather pricey. Here's a quick run down of the main features the board includes.

Board Features

• Support for Core i7 LGA1366 CPUs at 4.8-6.4GT/s QPI
  
• Intel X58 northbridge and ICH10R southbridge
  
• Six1.5V DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 24GB of memory
  
• One Realtek RTL8111C Gigabit Ethernet controllers
  
• Two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots providing two x16 links
  
• One PCI-Express x4 slot
  
• One PCI slot
  
• Six ICH10R SATA 3Gbps ports supporting Intel Matrix RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
  
• One IDE port supporting two devices from JMicron JMB363
  
• One eSATA port and one SATA 3Gbps ports from JMicron JMB363
  
• Twelve USB 2.0 ports - six on rear I/O, six via pin-outs
  
• VIA VT6315N IEEE1394a Firewire supporting two ports - one via pin-outs, one on the rear I/O
  
• SONAR X-Fi Xtreme HD Audio card featuring the premium Realtek ALC889 audio codec supporting EAX 4.0 and CMSS3D.

Box Contents

The box might be a bit small but the bundle's reasonable, aside from only having two SATA cables which strikes us as a bit mean. You get still the Asus Q-shield, the well machined rear IO plate that's nice to use, and more importantly, the Poster LCD display for easy POST error detection. Also thrown in is an IDE cable and Q-Connectors - the latter is always useful for making wiring the front panel easy - and an SLI bridge (CrossFire ones come with the graphics cards).

As usual the manual is well detailed and the driver disk comes with an auto-install function that's very welcome for the lazy among us.