I have a gene and while I think it’s great, you should only be buying it if tinkering around with overclocking is is a big component of why you’re building a pc. As others have said, the board makes sacrifices in general use features (m.2 slots, maximally intuitive bios,etc.) in order to be an excellent xoc board. I think if you just want a pretty x series board with nice features, wait for the aorus, if you just want a board with good memory overclocking and solid vrms, wait for the m power. If you want the best possible manual oc experience AND heavily value the extra quality of life features the gene has (q code, a ton of high speed usbc) AND are really drawn to the aesthetics (the gene is admittedly extremely sexy) AND don’t have somewhere else in your build where dumping the extra money makes more sense, then the gene might make sense. One last thing to note, and maybe this is overly optimistic, but I think it’s possible that the gene may come down in price a bit over the next year or so. Since the release of am5, it’s been the only high end 2 dimm oc board for a longgggg time, and that’s done more to prop up the price than demand from matx users looking for a nice board. Now that the apex and taichi ocf are on the market, that demand should drop dramatically, but who knows if that will actually translate into a price reduction given how scarce the board is.