ASUS Rampage II Gene mATX LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Hardware Installation

It is now time for our standard "Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme" fitting. This has become the customary heat sink to test fit a motherboard with as it seems to be the standard for cooling i7 processors. With the Rampage II Gene being m-ATX, it might not be the best choice as the likelihood of a low profile heat sink being used on this board increase. With that said, we don't have a low profile heat sink handy so the TRUE it is.

We don't feel like messing around so we'll get right to the meat and potatoes. You won't be able to run the TRUE in the north/south orientation with tall memory. The first image illustrates why. Even the second slot won't accommodate the taller Corsair Dominator modules. Standard height modules work fine though so that is dependent on memory. In the east/west orientation, however, the TRUE fits nicely. There is a ton of room for clearance over the north bridge heat sink which is always nice to see. As we said when going over the motherboard, these heat sinks really do sit low.

In the east/west orientation with a pair of fans mounted in push/pull, we still have a lot of room on this motherboard. The fans can sit as low as the retaining clips allow and in the second photo, we can see that there is still a lot of room above the PWM heat sink. This type of heat sink is obviously going to depend highly on the case the system is in, but if you have the height, the TRUE works very nice with this board in the east/west orientation. Even in the north/south layout, and standard height memory modules, the TRUE works quite well.

The next step is getting a couple monster video cards mounted. As mentioned, the single locking clip on the memory modules allows plenty of room for the GTX 295 in the top slot. It really isn't even close to the DIMM slots. Over on the front side, we can see that the bottom PCI-E 16X and PCI slots are free to accept hardware with just a single dual slot cooled video card. Any single video card should fit nicely with this motherboard because they don't get much bigger than the GTX 295...and hopefully down the road they won't get any bigger.

Doing the unthinkable, we have now stuffed two GTX 295's into the Rampage II Gene and despite a little over hang at the back, they fit like a pair of Isotoner's. There is no overhang off the bottom of the motherboard and we still have access to all connectors along the bottom edge aside from the single JMicron SATA connector as it is perpendicular to the motherboard. If you think about it, that last photo doesn't look overly cramped or indecent, but when you think about the computing power in that tiny little package, it makes the hair on my arms stand up. Perhaps that is just the A/C kicking in, but still, this Rampage II Gene offers a lot of potential power for such a small footprint.