INTRODUCTION
Once in a proverbial blue moon, a piece of hardware comes along that promises to be within a league all its own. Such is the case with the ASUS Striker Extreme Edition motherboard. For what I do, I have to keep on top of the latest and greatest in hardware. Whether it be the launch of a new chipset, new and improved memory modules, or wicked fast processors, I do my homework.
I've read a lot about the ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard lately, and I've been rubbing my hands together in eager anticipation of this. I have the chance to review what many regard to be the fastest mother board on the planet.
Built upon the new NVIDIA 680i chipset, the Striker is a member of ASUS' new Military-themed motherboards. That's not to say ASUS has switched to a camouflage PCB, but names like 'Striker' and 'Commando' serve to suggest that these new boards are performers.
So without any further adieu, let's set our sights on the Striker. I want to get this soldier moving.
The Chipset
The ASUS Striker Extreme has been built around the NVIDIA 680i chipset -- the most powerful and feature filled of the NVIDIA 600-series chipsets. The NVIDIA 680i chipset is relatively new, and is making great strides towards becoming the choice chipset for extreme gamers and hardware enthusiasts looking for the SLI performance advantage. ASUS has bestowed the Striker Extreme Edition motherboard with the notable 'Republic of Gamers' tag. Though it may be simple marketing on the part of ASUS -- a simple hope to capture the interest of gamers -- those ASUS boards that have been dubbed with that definitive distinction 'Republic of Gamers' do tend to be among some of the top performers ASUS has to offer.
Board Impressions
The Striker has room for up to six SATA drives, one parallel port channel, and one floppy connector. The vertical style of SATA ports does save some room on the motherboard when compared to the horizontial flat style of port, but does make it more difficult to connect a SATA cable when the board is mounted in the case and you can't see the port. The parallel port is in a bit of an odd location, sitting right beind the 24 pin motherboard power connector, making for a very tight squeeze.
The Asus Striker Extreme also comes with surface mounted Power, Reset, and Clear CMOS buttons (in order from left to right). Very nice for us hardware testers, not having to jumper a motherboard to life with a screwdriver. I would have liked a skull and crossbones button for the Clear CMOS button, but the label is good enough. :-) Oh, and they glow too.
In the rear, there is the standard gamut of I/O ports, and a few little extras.
A nice complement of additional ports. Yes, some are incredibly standard, like the PS2 and USB ports, but some of these additons are very nice.
I have to say ... without a doubt these are the craziest heatpipes I've ever seen. They are considerablly larger than typical heatpipe systems. The three heatsinks around the CPU socket help to cool the MOSFETS (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors) for the VCM (Voltage Controler Module) as they regulate the CPU voltages. The 1/4" copper heat pipe tubing then swoops around the CPU socket zone to a huge heatsink on the Northbridge chipset. That then branches off to the Southbridge cooler -- the one with that 'Republic of Gamers' tag on it.
This is one heck of a setup, and it does cool incredibly well, but there is an issue or two that I have to touch upon. First, that thermal gum is a cheap alternative to that can't even begin to compare with a quality thermal paste. But the real issue is the physical obstruction caused by all this heatpipe plumbing.
Bundled Hardware
It is typical of ASUS to bundle ample amounts of extra software and hardware with their motherboards and other PC hardware products. It seems especially true of their high end enthusiast hardware, thus making it true of the Striker. Asus tossed in a lot of goodies, and we'll take a few minutes to discuss all of them.
CONCLUSION
The ASUS Striker Extreme is one hell of a beautiful motherboard. It's built like a brick house, near perfectly designed, and boasts a number of unique features. ASUS also bundled more hardware/software with the Striker than most motherboard manufacturers would ever consider. You certainly get your dollars worth with the Striker.
But as for performance, there was something lacking. I would have liked to have seen some far better figures in the stock testing, but can surmise as to why I didn't. I had tested the ASUS Striker with the initial 1004 BIOS it had shipped with. During my testing phase of this review, I did discover (somewhere in my digital wanderings) a BETA BIOS for the Striker. Of course I wanted to try it (despite the obvious risks inherent within), but never got the opportunity.
When finishing up the last bits or writing for this review (all of the testing and overclocking completed), I read a few forum threads from a few different sites that had ASUS Striker owners complaining of the latest BIOS release (version 1102). Apparently, this new BIOS had turned their system into a very expensive paper weight. It didn't kill the motherboard (or any attached hardware) mind you, and was easily remedied by re-flashing the BIOS to the earlier version. Scary when stuff like that happens, isn't it?
But this brings me to my driving point.
The Striker is great, the 680i chipset is nice, but the drivers suck. NVIDIA has to hammer out a better 680i BIOS, and iron out some of those chipset communications conundrums. Once ASUS gets their hands on an improved BIOS, they take their time augmenting and testing it before they release it for the Striker.
Don't get me wrong, I like the 680i chipset very much, but I do feel that it is still very immature. It really needs some time to grow.
On another note, there have been reports of some super Strikers out there, in some figurative sense. For what I achieved with roughly a 450 MHz FSB (450x4=1800), I was pretty happy. But I have heard of some folks hitting 500 MHz, and some even reaching 520 or 530 MHz. It seems that there may be some production discrepancies that ASUS isn't completely aware of. It's not like certain runs of the Striker are better than others, but that every so often, one Striker board will out preform the rest. There's many parts of the tech industry that are like that, and we'll have to live with those unexpected surprises/tearful disappointments for a while longer.
At about $330 bucks USD on-line, it is quite the investment. But considering that it will handle SLI with the dual 16x PIC-e slots, that's a big selling point. The third PCI-e 8x slot for physics calculations is another benefit. And the bundle alone is almost all the excuse you need to buy the Striker. It may not have the brute strength bandwidth of an Intel chipset based board, but data compression and memory throughput isn't everything.
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