Reviews - ASUS Rampage II GENE: microATX mobo for Intel Core i7 chips

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Reducing the PCB size but upping the feature count, has ASUS managed the impossible?

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Read more.

My (scan-supplied) board came with 4 SATA cables, so the article isn't quite accurate on that point - I've had to use two of them on a customer's machine for length reasons, and I still have enough for the simpler rig I have planned for the Gene.

It is a nice board, the only real omission is the floppy connector, which makes the DFI X58 JR a better choice for some of my customers who need that feature for old software.

No Win7 drivers yet though :(

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Originally Posted by Irien

My (scan-supplied) board came with 4 SATA cables, so the article isn't quite accurate on that point - I've had to use two of them on a customer's machine for length reasons, and I still have enough for the simpler rig I have planned for the Gene.

It is a nice board, the only real omission is the floppy connector, which makes the DFI X58 JR a better choice for some of my customers who need that feature for old software.

No Win7 drivers yet though :(

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That's good to know. We'll contact ASUS and get official confirmation on what's included in the box.

sound awesum, would be my next upgrade for my sugo system

I got one of these a few days ago, and I'm very happy with the board, although the northbridge is a tad toasty it hasn't destabilised the system. A rather annoying bug is that the X-Fi emulation stuff doesn't work with Windows 7, probably a driver related issue, so I'll have to wait until Asus update the driver section of their website.

I'm just about to install the OS on my rampage Gene - I'd like to use Win7 64bit because of the SSD trim stuff. However, could you clarify if *any* sound works, or is it just the creative extensions that are non-functional? There are no Win 7 drivers on the Asus site which slightly worried me...

Oh the sound works flawlessly out of the box. The audio chip is an ADI1998 varient using the Intel HDA 'codec' interface. The X-Fi stuff is basically just the X-Fi 3D engine run in software. I've tested the audio chip by itself, it runs full steam on both Win7 and Linux. Another nice note is Intel's MatrixRAID works without extra drivers on Win7, that was pretty nice.

http://www.techspot.com/review/154-a...ne/page11.html

TechSpot's page (above) shows this board's power consumption is quite high, next to a P6T Deluxe.

Your review was useful, as well, btw. The "Level UP" features you mentioned look good for "lazy overclocking".

The major reason I'm looking at i7 is to accelerate Adobe Acrobat, when it reviews scanned documents. It can take up to 5 minutes to "review" (OCR, crop, etc) a 30-page document, with my e6600. I'm sure an i7-920 would speed that up. If I could easily overclock it a little at times, for extra speed, I'd be sold.

Any thoughts?