ASUS Maximus II Gene Motherboard

How we configured our test systems:  When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory for DDR2-1066 with 5-5-5-18 timings. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel Inside

We first ran our test motherboards through PCMark Vantage, Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads, including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so they can exploit the additional resources offered by multi-core CPUs.

We find the Maximus II Gene putting up PC Mark scores that are quite comparable to other, full-sized P45 boards.  It's nearly impossible to make a succinct comment as to its specific performance, as the scores range from the lowest performer in the Memories suite of tests to just about the highest in gaming.  However, we did notice that the Maximus II Gene tended to find itself in the lower end of the testing results, and second to last in the overall PCMark scoring.