Layout

At a first glance the ASUS Maximus VI Gene looks very good with its harmonic design. Once again the ROG-colors - red, black and white - suite nicely and together with the black PCB it becomes a beautiful product. The layout itself is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allows an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.

The ASUS Maximus VI Gene comes with a digital 8+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets a stable current supply from two individual phases. Furthermore ASUS equips this board with their so called "BlackWing Chokes". Furthermore those chokes can cope with up to 60A per phase. Furthermore there are 10K Black Metallic Capacitors, which have an average life expectancy of 10'000 hours.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Maximus VI Gene. Officially supported are DDR3 3000 / 2933 / 2800 / 2666 / 2600 / 2500 / 2400 / 2200 / 2133 / 2000 / 1866 / 1800 / 1600 / 1333 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.

On the Maximus VI Gene the southbridge is being cooled by a passiv cooling block. A closer look at the area where the VRM is, shows that there are two additional heatsinks, which have been connected with a heatpipe. Like they do with every new Maximus motherboards series, ASUS changed the looks of the heatsinks slightly.