Product Showcase

When we flip the board around we see the 24-pin ATX power connector to the left, a MemOK/GO button is there (recovers the motherboard from a faulty memory overclock yet leaves the rest of the BIOS settings in-tact). In the middle a USB 3.0 port connector and then the SATA ports and a diagnostic status post LED.

The GENE supports 2 native SATA 6Gbps ports (RED) with RAID 0,1,5,10 while 4 SATA 3Gb/s ports with RAID 0,1,5,10. You get another two SATA3 ports thanks to an extra ASMEdia (RED) controller.

The GENE also comes with voltage monitoring points, but they are simply points ... it would be nice to see some sort of tiny connectors here.

Expansion slots then, the Sabertooth comes with 2 PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (single at x16, dual at x8/x8),then there's one PCIe 2.0 x4. The two graphics card slots support NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossfireX. The board also supports LucidLogix Virtu MVP Technology.

Funky to see is that on the backside of the motherboard ASUS implemented a series of red LED.

As simple as it it really is, it looks incredibly cool. much like a sporty car with light coming from underneath it. It gives the GENE a very trendy and hip looks alright.

So that's it for the photo's, I do need to mention DIGI+ power control, the USB Flashback feature (put the BIOS on an USB stick, power down, press the button on the back panel and it's flashing the firmware). Also a new feature is Network traffic shaping which ASUS calls Network iControl, allowing you to assign and control Ethernet bandwidth. So if you want to reserve precious bandwidth for gaming while downloading, that is now an option as you may program profiles. Lets focus on the Z77 chipset for a minute now.