ASUS Rampage II Gene mATX LGA1366 Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

ASUS utilizes an AMI BIOS with their motherboards and does the layout a little bit different from the standard setup. The very first screen we start on in the Rampage II Gene BIOS is the Extreme Tweaker section, quite a nice feature for those constantly adjusting system settings.

Jammed into one lengthy section are all of our overclocking settings including sub menus to the CPU Configuration, DRAM Timings, and DRAM REF Voltage pages. The good thing is that the Page Down button on the keyboard works in the AMI BIOS allowing us to skip a whole page at a time, a huge time saver and a feature I wish was in every BIOS.

Everything is pretty self explanatory from top to bottom with the "automatic" overclocking selections appearing at the top like CPU Level UP and Memory Level Up. XMP profile settings are also selected right from the top within the Ai Overclock Tuner menu. Moving down we have access to the various DRAM and Uncore ratios. The BCLK and PCIE frequency options only appear after setting Ai Overclock Tuner to manual. The DRAM Timing Control section can be seen in the second photo above. A full collection of timings are available including individual channel RTL adjustments which is nice to see. We also really like how the current timings are shown so we know what we are currently working with.

The voltage selection section is next on the large screen and like the timings, current values are shown above each section. We really like this reference so we don't have to jump around to the hardware monitoring section. ASUS has down extremely well with this BIOS and made it a very nice place to work for the overclocker. We will now go over the voltage selection options from the BIOS, and we find yet another board with no need for volt mods.

Like we said, voltage mods need not apply here. We were just discussing this the other day in a forum about how all of these i7 motherboards are able to bench with LN2 right out of the box pretty much. So far, we haven't touched a single i7 board with a soldering iron aside from the EVGA X58 3X SLI motherboard, but that was simply for read point extensions. It is nice to see the Gene carry on this tradition as all the voltage we could ask for is available at our fingertips.

After the Extreme Tweaker section, we get into the standard BIOS option screens starting with the Main screen. Next to the Main option screen is our Advanced section. The Advanced section has a bit of a grab bag of options including the CPU Configuration page we initially had access to in the Tweaker section, as well as the onboard device selections. The LCD Poster and LED Control section allow us to adjust what we want to display on the LCD Poster as well as the ability to control the onboard LED's that outline the various voltage levels of specific components.

The CPU Configuration section is quite full with a lot of options, more than most other boards in fact. Here we can enable or disable all of the CPU features like SpeedStep and Turbo mode. The Onboard Devices Configuration section does the same but for onboard devices.

The only important screens from the Power section are that of the monitoring pages. We can see we have a full slew of Voltage, Temperature, and Fan Speed monitoring pages. We also have fan control for only four fan headers. This was a bit disappointing but the control offered is pretty decent. With the CPU and Chassis fans we have the options for simply what is shown in the last photo, nothing more precise than that. The other OPT fans offer us Duty or User control. With Duty, we can simply set a percentage we want the fans to spin at, and with User we can set minimum and maximum temperatures. These temperatures we assume are based on the optional temperature headers we can plug into the motherboard. Unfortunately, we don't receive any temperature sensors with the accessory package so the feature is kind of useless anyway.

The last of the BIOS sections we are going to look at today involve the built in BIOS tools. This is another section that really adds functionality to the Rampage II Gene. First off we have ASUS EZ Flash 2, a standard on ASUS motherboards for a long time now. It is simply the easiest way to flash a motherboard either from a floppy drive, USB thumb drive, or even a hard drive connected to the system. Simply load up EZ Flash 2, select the drive and the BIOS file and flash away.

The second photo above shows the O.C. Profile section. We have eight slots to save profiles to and can name each slot. In addition to that, we can also start the O.C. Profile program which allows us to save BIOS configurations to thumb drive or the hard drive. This makes it easy to share and backup BIOS configurations. We use to praise DFI for this ability but ASUS has taken it to the next level. There really isn't much else we could ask for as far as BIOS saving is concerned.

The last of the Tools is the Tweak-It Batch File. This is a first for this reviewer and after a few minutes of playing around it was evident what this tool offered. We can basically setup a batch file to adjust the listed settings and voltages, and then run it from Tweak-It. This essentially gives us the ability to change a whole bunch of settings on the fly with a single selection through Tweak-It. We only have two batch file spots to save but it is still a nice little addition to the package.