The premium motherboard market's newfound love for the micro-ATX form-factor has been dutifully addressed by companies such as DFI, by releasing the LANParty Jr series, featuring high-end chipsets and almost complete feature-sets that rival full-sized ATX motherboards. ASUS has now decided to put its Republic of Gamers (ROG) series on the prowl with its first high-end mATX motherboard: Rampage II Gene.

As the name suggests, the motherboard supports Intel Core i7 series processors, and is based on the Intel X58 chipset. ASUS keeps the segment of buyers in mind that builds light-weight, yet full-featured LAN party machines. The Rampage II Gene features an 8-phase CPU power circuit. It features six DDR3 DIMM slots for to support up to 24GB of triple-channel DDR3 memory. It holds two full-length PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots plus a PCI-Express x4 open-ended slot. Both ATI CrossFireX and NVIDIA Quad-SLI are supported. The ICH10R southbridge provides six SATA II channels with RAID support. Also provided is an onboard SupremeFX X-Fi sound system that provides support for most of Creative's X-Fi sound technologies. Two gigabit Ethernet interfaces and support for the iROG - TweakIT features, that simplify overclocking, make for the rest of the package. The Rampage II Gene is expected to be priced above $200 in the US.