Asus Rampage II Gene

On its website Asus says the Rampage II Gene packs maximum power into a mini size and after putting the board through our test gauntlet, we can only agree with the Taiwanese component titan.

The board uses Intel’s X58 Northbridge and also features the ICH10R Southbridge and this gives the board a range of capabilities; it’s compatible with all the Core i7 CPUs on the market, can accept up to 24Gbytes of memory and for those interested in a high-end gaming rig, it packs SLI and CrossFire X support as well. This is impressive when you consider the board’s micro ATX form factor.

Being a board from Asus’ Republic of Gamers (ROG) line, we expected the Rampage II Gene to offer overclocking nirvana and, expectedly, the board delivered. The BIOS offers every overclocking option under the sun and both voltage and frequency options are generous and will allow you to push your components to their very limits.

In terms of performance the board proved a screamer. Its Sandra ALU figure of 68.15GIPS puts it ahead of most of the boards we’ve tested to date and the Int Buff and Float Buff scores proved very strong too. On the multimedia performance front, the Asus proved swift across the board returning excellent figures in our MP3 and DivX encode tests. Its gaming performance too was hugely impressive given that it beat the scores produced by several other, more expensive, X58 boards.