Overclocking

We only noticed occasional throttling at stock speed, but this didn't result in any noticeable drops in our benchmarks, and this seems to be a common issue when dealing with Intel's Core i9-9900K. When overclocked, things were a different matter, and to prevent the CPU kicking back from 5GHz to 4.7GHz under load you'll need to increase CPU/Core/Cache Current Limit to maximum in the EFI first - this will otherwise happen no matter what other voltages or cooling you use. Once we dialled this in, we started at our usual 1.3V and worked our way down, ending on a final vcore of 1.2V - the lowest we've seen for hitting 5GHz and an indicator there's headroom if you have some beefy cooling.

Performance Analysis

There wasn't too much to report in terms of benchmarks, as the Gene sat within the rest of the field across the board with just small amounts separating the boards and certainly no numbers that would alter a decision to buy one or the other. Audio performance was a little behind that of the ROG Maximus XI Hero but again not by margins your average human ear will be bothered about, although it did have an exceptionally low THD.

The power consumption figures were on the money too with four other boards drawing more power under load to hit the same frequency. Only the overclocked idle result was a little high and interestingly so was the Hero.

Conclusion

The ROG Maximus XI Gene has been the talk of the Z390 motherboard market and for good reason - it's the first sub-ATX board we've seen from Asus in a while that isn't afraid to tweak a tried and tested design in an attempt to be different and offer something new as well as including all those crazy features you'd expect from an ROG board. This added engineering and extended feature set comes at a price, but given we've been lamenting the loss of the Gene and Impact so much over the last few years, we'd be a bit two-faced if we criticised Asus here purely based on price. 

What it has delivered is exactly what many of us wanted - a flagship board that overclocks like a trooper and makes you go 'phwoar!', but Asus hasn't just included features for the sake of it - they're genuinely useful for both extreme overclockers and those looking to splash a couple of grand or more on a PC designed to turn heads. The ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming had hints of this, but the new Gene hits the nail on the head - so much so that we don't really care how much it is, we just want one, and that's exactly the feeling a true ROG board should inspire.