Richard Sapp: Review: Asus Rampage III Gene

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Review: Asus Rampage III Gene

Maximum power in a minimalist package. That's what the new Asus Rampage III Gene is all about.

But is it even a sensible idea to force-feed enthusiast-class performance and features into a small-form factor motherboard? Quite possibly, yes.

Micro-ATX motherboards aren't hugely smaller than the ATX standard. What's more, the greater level of feature integration in the latest processors means motherboards themselves are simpler and require fewer components.

Affordable high-ender

Ultimately, however, what really counts are the features and performance on offer, not size. The Asus Rampage III Gene sports Intel's top CPU socket and chipset combo in the LGA1366 and X58. That means support for Intel's Core i7 processors, including the mighty six-core Gulftown chip.

You also get USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps and a pair of 16-lane PCI-e graphics ports for multi-GPU action.

At �170, it's even relatively affordable for a high-end motherboard based on Intel's X58 chipset. The full-size Rampage III Extreme costs nearly �300. Full-sized enthusiast boards based on Intel's premium X58 chipset cost a lot of money.

Consequently, board makers feel obliged to weigh them down with a ton of features. The Asus Rampage III Extreme, for example, packs no less than four 16-lane PCI Express ports. In theory, that enables quad-GPU graphics action. In practice, you're paying for a feature that you will literally never use.

Asus rampage iii gene

Cramming it in

With that in mind, the Asus Rampage III Gene has the makings of a perfect performance motherboard.

The micro- ATX form factor means frippery isn't an option. Instead, Asus has focussed on the features that matter. Instead of four PCI Express graphics ports, you get two of them and support for both multi- GPUs platforms: NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire.

Asus has also managed to cram in a full set of six DDR3 memory slots and even makes sure they don't fight with the graphics port for space. That's an achievement that eludes many full ATX motherboards.

Space around the CPU socket for heavy duty cooling is likewise ample and hardware buttons for power, reset and clear CMOS are all present. As for performance, you'll struggle to spot the difference between this motherboard and a full ATX equivalent. That's because there really isn't any.

That includes overclocking which tops out at around 220MHz on the baseclock and includes an absolutely comprehensive array of BIOS options. In terms of speed, 220MHz on the baseclock is right up there with any high-end X58 chipset motherboard and more than enough to extract the most from any LGA1366 CPU.

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