ASUS Rampage III Gene review - Introduction

Cute tiny and sexy .. don't we all like it ? Within that motto ASUS has it's own Gene series within the motherboard line up. Now if you put that on the X58 platform, it's called Rampage by ASUS. And then when this apocalyptic group of minions and demons called 'Republic of Gamers' aka ROG gets their hands on a product like this, you can expect improvements and extra overclock features.

The end results is is, the ASUS Rampage III Gene ROG edition. You know, it is hard to believe that the first Core i7 processors and this chipset were released ages ago. I mean, the Core i7 965 Extreme and X58 chipset were released in 2008, November the 3rd 2008 to be precise.

And sure, there have been processor updates but really, our VGA tests systems for example, still run on X58 and that 965X processor. The entire setup is just THAT good, and we expect that it will remain being the case for a long time to come as well. Especially with the delicious six core 980X processor recently released.

Technology is evolving though and the biggest trend over the past few months and the upcoming year will of course be SATA 6G (6 Gbit) and USB 3.0 (5 Gbit). Intel is stalling though, they just won't release new chipsets with the new features until early 2011 (Sandy bridge). And as a result the ODMs are simply adapting and trying to pick up the trend by placing additional controllers themselves on the motherboard PCB.

ASUS decided to release and update the the Gene series, the Rampage III Gene. What ASUS today releases with the X58 based Rampage III Gene is good performance, quality, versatility, some recently introduced innovation and nice overclockability all on a small mATX form factor. New features allow this board to be overclock it through your laptop.

The rest of the specifications of the mATX form factor Rampage III Gene will endear itself to PC enthusiasts and gamers. It supports a maximum of 24GB DDR3 memory, and has twin PCIe (physical x16) slots: which supports single and dual multi-GPU graphics card configurations, plus obviously is supports both NVIDIA's SLI and ATI’s Crossfire up you get to run up-to two graphics cards in PCIe x8 mode.

Armed with some new features and a funky design let's have a peek at the ASUS Rampage III Gene, for what I feel is a very interesting Intel X58 chipset based mATX motherboard currently available in the market. Let's go check it out shall we ?