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Alright check it out. Today we're going to look at
the Rampage II Gene or it could be genie.
I don't really know what they're trying to say with that.
But, this is an awesome motherboard.
First to market X58 in a Micro-ATX form factor.
You're not going to see this on any other boards.
At least for now. I haven't seen one yet.
Look at the size of this thing. It's tiny.
It's hard to believe that this tiny little motherboard
is so extremely, hugely impressively powerful.
This has pretty much got all the same features as
the Asus Rampage II Extreme but in a small form factor.
You got the X58 chipset, ICH10R south bridge chipset.
You can have two PCI express slots, both will do x16.
x16 at fully populated. SLI or CrossFireX; it's up to you.
On top of that you get one of those really cool,
I don't even know what they're calling these things.
Mini PCI express. They're x4 PCI expresses, or x8.
They're very cool. You also get a PCI standard.
You get all the great overclocking features.
Absolutely incredible. I have a dream.
And my dream is to build a water cooled, duel GTX 295 system
using this motherboard. Now, will that happen?
I do not know. Asus send me another one of these.
I would love it.
This board is very cool. Let's get into it.
Now first of all,
talk about the basics.
Processor, obviously Socket 1366, X58 Chipset,
Corex7 processors, your 920s 940s, your 965s
and coming soon, your the 975s and 955s.
And also your xeons. If you want to use xeons in here.
Like a 5500 or 3500 series. It will work as well.
Memory. Up to 12 GBs of DDR3.
Natively will support up to 1600 megahertz
and then of course, on top of that
you can go as high as your want with overclocking.
You get seven SATA ports on this board, all right.
Take a look at that.
Seven.
OK, that supports every single type of RAID that is common in the consumer market.
Which is 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and JBOD or Just a Bunch of Discs.
You have on board eight channel audio, alright?
Check this out, right over here.
See that? HD audio.
Now it's not the normal Azalia controller that's on there.
It's actually 8-channel HD X5 SupremeFX Audio on here.
So it's like a built in sound card. Right here you'll see
right here, you got a little, there it is, a little plaque.
So that is like having a sound card built into the board.
Excellent signal to noise ratio. It sounds absolutely incredible.
It sounds just like if you had the card actually on the board separated
and not integrated into the board.
On top of all of that, more great features.
Obviously SLI, CrossFire; support for both of them right there.
The hardware on this board is incredible.
First of all, this cooler is awesome.
It looks really cool. Pin thin design,
works very well. The northbridge chipset on X58 doesn't get that hot
because the memory controller is built into the CPU cooler.
Or, into the CPU. So make sure you have a good CPU cooler.
But this will be kept very cool. Lots of power coming on here.
You have one 8-pin power connector up here.
You should use eight, you can use four, but I suggest you get eight
to get the full 300 Watts. To get the safest, cleanest, most secure power.
Hardware on here, incredible.
Solid state capacitors everywhere. Ferrite core chokes.
Low RDS(on) MOSFETs. All the best stuff you can possibly want.
Plus, on top of all of this, even more.
All the greatest overclocking features you could ever want.
First of all, an incredible BIOS just like the Rampage II Extreme
maybe even a few extra features that they're going to throw in there
in the next revision of the BIOS.
You get dual BIOS so if you crash one or you corrupt one
you can switch to another. You have easy flash
so if you need to reflash the BIOS you can do it with a USB flash drive.
You have the volt minder LEDs They tell you... you can't see them
but here's your DIM, there's actually a few lights, mini LEDs,
they'e in there, they're very small. But they light up, green, yellow and red
to tell you where your volts are.
And pretty much everything on here, that you can adjust the voltage on gives you.
Just like right here, you can actually see a DDR.
It says, Crazy, High and Normal.
And different ones will light up depending on how high your voltages are.
So once you're at 1.65 it will go to High.
If you go above that it goes to Crazy
'cause YOU'RE crazy for going above 1.65 Volts. Not really.
I'm running 1.75 Volts at 1800 with cass 676-24, 1T command line ratios
on this board. That's using Corsair 1866 MHz memory.
So this is an awesome board.
On top of all that you've got load line calibration
which is like Vdroop. It will also help you reset the board.
If you have an overclocking failure, it kind of understands what's going on.
On board buttons as you can tell down here.
You have a Clear CMOS, Reset and Power button
which are all right there, as well as,
if you look at the back panel.
You've got a nice little Clear CMOS right up here at the top.
So when you're overclocking already inside the case,
very easy to clear. Now on top of that,
Let's go through the input output panel on the back.
You do have PS2s, USB 2.0s, the Clear CMOS, we just discussed.
If you keep moving down, look at this stuff.
Two USB 2.0s. You got a FireWire, eSATA, you got an SP-DIV
for your Toslink optical audio.
This will do eight channels of audio through one cable.
You got single gigabit Ethernet versus dual on the
Asus Rampage II Extreme. So it's a little bit less,
but you're probably not going to need it.
You got another two USB 2.0s bringing the total on the back to six.
And of course, the extreme, Supreme X-Fi sound blaster back here.
It looks like it's a built in solution, but it's not.
It's a dedicated chip on the board. You are getting Creative's chip on here
and Asus pretty much licenses it as their own.
But it is very, very high quality audio. Really nice.
Let's go, real quickly, before I leave you guys,
I want to show you in the back, you have the stack cool
plate. It's going to help you keep everything cooler.
Plus, it's going to give you better tension on your CPU cooler
so you can keep everything nice and pinned down.
You got the most contact.
And, before I leave you,
Amazing stuff. Asus is really famous for what they give you in the box.
And, well, you're going to get a lot.
First of all, probably the coolest sticker I've ever seen.
I think that's sweet. If you put this on the corner of your case.
The Asus Rampage logo. Republic of Gamers.
Very, very cool. And I think it's limited edition or something
because it's actually got a serial number down here
and some writing in Chinese. Don't know what that means, but,
I can guess what that means. It means freaking awesome is what it means.
Connectors for SLI and for CrossFire.
A bunch of silly, floppy IDE type cables that you're never use, hopefully.
Some zip ties. A very nice padded, shielded input/output shield.
Pretty much these pads help reduce, not only vibration and noise
but also, resistance and electrical interference. EMI interference.
Electromagnetic interference. Which is really bad.
You got the Q connectors which are very popular.
Pretty much, you plug in. See you got little labels there.
Power, Ground, Reset. And you put all your cables from your front panel here.
You have them all in one place and then you push this entire thing into the board.
And wow, is this helpful. It's incredible.
On top of that you get the LCD Poster.
Which lets you do a whole bunch of stuff.
If tells you all... You can program it to do a lot of things.
But basically what it's going to tell you at first is
just post codes.
Later on it can tell you frequencies. All sorts of good stuff.
You got SATA cables. Oh my gosh! SATA cables all over the place!
You've got, one, two, three, four SATA cables!
Two are 90 degrees, the rest are regulars.
On top of that, your Asus Rampage disc. With 3D Mark-Vantage key on the back.
Very nice. That's worth $19.00 I believe. Or $9.00. One of the two.
Nice little gift. Let's you benchmark your computer.
See if you got some overclocking skills or not.
And finally, the User Guide. If you don't know about
a certain subject of this motherboard
you can definitely find it in here. This thing is extremely in depth.
Awesome stuff. This is an incredible motherboard.
The packaging is incredible. This sticker, it sold me with this.
The fact that this is a Micro-ATX motherboard means that
you can pretty much make it in a really small case.
Granted, X58 runs hot. Big nasty video cards that you would stick in here run hot.
But, gosh. My dream,
if you guys would just sit back for a second and relax with me
and kind of understand. Imagine a square cube case.
Really small and just big enough for the power supply and the case.
Alright? You load up a 920 in here.
You overclock it to about 3.8 maybe 4GHz with a single water cooling,
one of those little coolant dominoes that you all see,
or the Masscool, the Masscool coolers.
It's actually right over there, it's a water cooled single radiator
1x120 with a 120mm fan on it, pump is built into the block
and it just pumps water.
You do that, you do two nice video cards.
Maybe two GTX 295 or maybe some two GTX 260 Core 216's
and you have a very small, very portable, insanely powerful
LAN computer that you can take with you.
Imagine going to a LAN party and everyone is there with their little
boxes of Core II Duo stuff. You take your LAN box is like,
not as good as your Home box. It's smaller, it's less powerful.
With something like this you can be the envy of everybody.
You will dominate everybody as far as performance goes
and get the highest frame rates. If you're going to do some
benchmarking there, you're going to own everybody.
Because they're going to be Core II Duos and you're going to be on an X58
in a small case. It's incredible.
So if you want to be that little light fighter; lots of power in a small package
this is it.
It's the Asus Rampage II Gene. Genie?
I'm not sure if anyone out there actually knows the truth
of what the answer is. I've been getting mixed results on what it actually is.
To me that looks like Gene, but it could be Genie.
You know, Gene-ee. I don't know.
Great board, X58 Micro-ATX. Good stuff.
If you have any questions on it, email me.
And I will see you guys next time.
For more information on the Asus Rampage II Gene
type in A455-2857
into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For ComputerTV, I'm Albert.
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