Layout

Already at a first glance the ASUS Maximus V Gene looks very good with its harmonic design. Once again the ROG-colors - red, grey and black - suite nicely and together with the black PCB it becomes a very 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, allow an easy installation of oversized graphics cards like for example a Radeon HD 6990.

ASUS equipped the Maximus V Gene with a digital 8+4 phase power design. In this case the CPU can rely on eight phases and the iGPU gets its own four phases. Furthermore the memory gets power from another two digital phases. Each of these 14 phases comes with new high quality "Black Metallic Chokes". These can resist much higher current (50A instead of 30A). In other words this means that one phase can cope with far more load than the predecessor.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Maximus V Gene. Officially supported are the following clock speeds: 2800 (O.C.) / 2666 (O.C.) / 2600 (O.C.) / 2400 (O.C.) / 2200 (O.C.) / 2133 (O.C.) / 2000 (O.C.) / 1866 (O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 MHz. There is also enough 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 oversized heatspreaders.

Southbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The cooling blocks haven been positioned wisely, which means that they don't collide with memory or CPU cooler. Fortunately ASUS decided to not install an active southbridge cooler.