Asus Maximus II Gene Review

Stability

As usual we reset the BIOS to its default values and loaded up both Prime 95 torture test and 3DMark 06 looping to see if the board could withstand the stress to CPU power draw, memory and PCI-Express for 24 hours. Apart from a fan to cool the CPU heatsink, there was no other used, meaning the heatsinks and heatpipes have to withstand very little airflow and still keep cool.

After a day we came back to find the Gene hadn't missed a beat and was still completely responsive with both programs still running. We can therefore conclude that the board's underlying stability is excellent.

Value and Conclusion

The Gene is a nice little P45 board with plenty of grunt, a solid BIOS and decent overclocking but for the size it isn't cheap. The DFI P45 BloodIron JR for example supports loosely the same feature-set and even layout design, however it's a good £30 cheaper.

We won't compare the Gigabyte board directly - because if you're buying a micro ATX board you are doing so for the size reason - but that small form factor still has the compromise of additional cost, fewer options in respect to peripheral slots, and less respective overclocking potential. Not to mention the broken performance of the extra SATA. It's not by much, but you're paying for less physical board, less hardware, and less overclocking, but, it costs more. In that light, it's not Maximus II awesomeness the namesake suggests.


That is, however, clearly not the whole story. The underlying fact is that the Maximus II Gene is great motherboard: it's micro ATX and it works. It's small form factor and you can still overclock it very well, run multiple graphics cards, have tons of SATA out the box, have plenty to play with in the fully featured BIOS and basically do almost everything you can on a big board. You won't tell the performance difference when downsizing at all and in an Apples to Apples comparison at stock speed, the Asus was a constant winner in all our tests.

At the end of the day the compromise is not that great, and depending on your sway to use less space, it's one worth making for the Gene.

• Performance
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• x
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• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
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• x
• x
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• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

Score Guide