ASUS, one of the world's most recognizable names in the motherboard industry, announced yesterday the expansion of its GENE Series of motherboards with the introduction of the new Maximus II GENE, a new product that comes to take advantage of Intel's P45 Express Chipset. The new board offers support for Intel's latest Core 2 Extreme, Quad and Duo processors in an mATX form factor that enables users and system vendors to design high-performance PCs inside smaller-sized form factors. In addition, the new board follows in the footsteps laid out by the Rampage II GENE board, offering ASUS' exclusive features, such as MemOK!, CPU Level Up and SupremeFX X-FI.
As you can expect from a P45-enabled motherboard, the new Maximum II GENE is designed to provide support to all socket 775-compatible processors with a maximum FSB of 1600MHz. The board is equipped with 4 DDR2 dual-channel memory DIMMs that can support a maximum of 16GB of 1300MHz memory. In addition, the board is equipped with two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots with support for ATI's CrossFireX multi-GPU technology, one PCI-Express x1 and one PCI 2.2 slot.
Despite the small form factor, users can also make do with the 7 SATA 3.0Gb/s ports, one eSATA 3.0Gb/s, one UltraDMA 133, Gigabit LAN, 12 USB 2.0 ports and two 1394a ports. Other I/O ports include one PS/2, one eSATA, one IEEE1394a, one Clr CMOS and one optical S/PDIF.
Like any respectable overclocking motherboard, the new Maximus II Gene board comes with unique features such as ASUS' own MemOK!, SupremeFX X-Fi, CPU Level Up, Keyboard-TweakIt, Extreme Tweaker, iROG, Loadline Calibration, LCD Poster, EPU-6 Engine, Voltiminder LED. In addition, ASUS also throws in an interesting software bundle that includes a Kaspersky anti-virus and Futuremark's 3DMark06 Advanced Edition. Unfortunately, ASUS did not provide any details regarding the pricing and availability of the new board, but we will try to keep you up to speed as soon as these details become available.
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