Tech Reaction

This is just a nice teaser of the Asus Rampage II Gene.

From all the good things I have heard about this board I figured, what the hell, lets give it a shot! It showed up over the weekend and for now you all can make due with these pictures of the motherboard. Still waiting on a few other parts to get here, before we see this board in action. Without further ado, here are the pics:

Thoughts so far:

Overall the placement of everything on the motherboard seems to flow well. With this M-ATX design,however, a few things needed to be modded from the bigger ATX models. The battery is no longer in a horizontal position on this board, ASUS has sent it vertical and gave it a new home next to the RAM slots. Speaking of RAM slots, did you happen to notice only 1 side of the slots have retaining clips? From the picture above you can see just how close the RAM slots come to the PCI-E Slot. With today’s monstrosities we call video cards, they had to take those retaining clips off to clear up room. With that side of the clips gone everything with fit nice and snugly as it should. However, if you have a Corsair fan cooler or the OCZ fan cooler for the RAM you may be out of luck trying to use them on this board. I have yet to test and see if they will still work with this design. I am going to venture a guess and say I seriously doubt they will work. I will test it to find out for sure and have that information in the next section of the review.

For now that is all I have for you. When I get it up and running I will post the BIOS pictures and tests of how well this board does under a water cooling setup.