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The Rampage II Gene is shipped into a good looking red box that goes straight to the point. Only the model name, along with stickers stating support for vanilla and Extreme Edition Core i7 processors as well as the X58 chipset. The board supports multi-GPU technologies so the mandatory ATI and nVidia logos are present as well. The top flips open to reveal some of the board's most interesting features. All the motherboard's specifications are found on the back along with a few notable features.

The board itselft is assembled on a dark brown PCB with blue and white DIMM, blue PCI-Express slots, except the 4x one which is black, with the elderly PCI slot at the bottom. The black RoG heatsinks definitely add some personality to this small board.

There's nothing of much interest on the back side beside the fact that the heatsinks are solidly screwed into place so they can't wiggle around.

The area around the processor's socket is free of obstacles and the board is just as wide as standard ATX. Even though there might be some clearance issues with large heatsinks and tall memory heatspeaders, this mATX motherboard won't be worse than any other. Asus drilled holes not only for socket 1366 heatsinks, but also 775 in order to maintain backward compatibility.

The pair of triple channel memory slots support DDR3 up to 2000 MHz through overclocking. On their bottom right is the PATA header along with the 24 pin power connector right on the edge. The battery sits vertically on the top right edge with a 4 pin fan connector just above it.

Since this is a mATX board, expansion is rather limited, although with the amount of onboard hardware it shouldn't be much of a problem. The pair of full length PCI-Express slots are double spaced so it's possible to fit most video cards in CrossFire or SLI. Of course, taking the multi-GPU route will disable the the PCI-E 4x and PCI slots. The bottom edge is rather busy and has just about everything a top end board usually has. Among the headers are high definition audio, FireWire, USB and a couple 4 pin fan connectors. There's also the ever useful start and reset buttons along with a button Asus calls MemOK, more on this later on.

On the bottom left corner is a very interesting addition. Other Rampage boards come with a dedicated sound card, but since Asus obviously couldn't fit one here, they went with an onboard X-Fi SupremeFX audio chip.

All six SATA 3Gbps ports are on the bottom right edge. Since they are angled, long video cards won't pose any problems and it usually makes cable management easier. The lone vertical black SATA port is courtesy of the JMicron controller.

The I/O's are rather complete with six USB ports, a single eSATA and FireWire ports, the usual six audio outputs as well as an optical output. The legacy PS/2 keyboard can come in handy at times, while the Clear CMOS button is a great thing to have back there. I would've liked to see a second LAN port, but I guess you just can't squeeze everything on such a small form factor.

Finally, the Rampage II Gene comes with a nice set of accessories. The I/O plate is padded with a thick layer of foam to minimize vibrations and the front side of it is clearly labeled. It also comes with a PATA cable and four SATA cables, two of which have an angled connector on one end. Additionaly, Asus includes a Q-Connector, a SLI bridge, a neat LCD poster and, of course, a manual along with a driver disc.