Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Z68 Motherboard Review

Design wise, the Gene-Z is a ROG board and because of that, I simply love it, and with a lot of mods and fans on the market utilising red, it’s a really strong colour scheme to use if you’re wanting to colour coordinate your system build. The fact that it all comes nicely packaged as a Micro ATX based board is just amazing, and they really do incorporate a lot onto the Gene-Z.

Feature wise, we see a good selection of features that we saw on the Maximus IV Extreme-Z, just slightly less of, such as the expansion slots, though they have still thought about the end-user and what they are likely to want and need. That’s why we find two PCI-Express x16 slots, ready for a multi-GPU configurations, and a single x4 slot which is perfect for other expansion devices like the RevoDrive from OCZ or other similar devices. We also find all of the relevant features in terms of performance, with an easy to use UEFI BIOS and all of the options and settings you’d expect from a ROG board, regardless of it being a small board, it seems to be a small board that can pack a punch.

In terms of performance, we can see that some really strong results came from testing the board with our usual set of components, and overclocking to 4.6GHz, which was easy by the way, showed some good increases, especially when we look at PCMark 7 which stresses the whole system in multiple ways. Even though this is a ROG board, the power consumption was still relatively low considering the performance that we had on offer.

Overclocking was a real dream, and with thanks to the UEFI BIOS, we saw some great results under our H80 cooler. 5.2GHz was a great number to end up at, considering the size of the board and our expectations thinking that 5GHz would be a limit, but the board just carried on delivering and managed to hit 5.2GHz with a reasonable amount of volts and only involved changing the multiplier, enabling LLC and tweaking three different voltages, including the Vcore and PLL.

The Gene-Z comes in at an astonishingly low £146.99 and now includes PCIe 3.0 support, which is better than half price over its bigger brother; the Maximus IV Extreme-Z which is priced at £304.99. This goes to show that the Gene-Z can still keep up, regardless of size.

Looking at how well the Gene-Z performed at stock, how easy things were to tweak and the overclocking results that we’ve seen today, has made the Gene-Z one of my favourite boards of all time, as it simply does it all, is one of the best priced boards on the market, and nothing out there can compete with it for that price, considering what you get on offer. It’s not all about the price, and that’s why we haven’t awarded it the “Bang for Buck Award” as it also deserves the “Overclockers Dream Award”, the “Extreme Performance Award” and our “Innovation Award”, so to wrap it all up into one, we feel that it’s one of the greatest motherboards ever developed, and we give it a hearty thumbs up, with our “Editor’s Choice Award”.