First look: ASUS Striker II Extreme

First photos of the first non-reference 790i board in Australia!

With the 790i being eagerly awaited, we’ve had the Striker II Extreme -- part of the Republic of Gamers (R.O.G.) series of motherboards from ASUS -- arrive for some grueling testing.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be putting this motherboard, as well as others in our monthly testing, through the fiery hoops and mine littered obstacle courses between the Atomic labs and you guys. Without any further dribbling – or perhaps the start – here are some photos we quickly snapped for you all as a tease!



The Striker II Extreme sitting, waiting to be thrown through the gauntlet



The rear I/O ports of the new R.O.G. board



Like select other boards in the R.O.G. family since the P35 based Blitz series, this board comes with a built in ‘Fusion Block System’ – for the non-marketing folk, this means built in water cooling.



The CPU socket area is very similar to many of the recent boards from ASUS, not just those based on NVIDIA chipsets. Note the darker colouring of the metal; ASUS may have used proper copper this time around, not just painted aluminium – more on this once confirmed.



A reverse shot of the socket area showing the square shaped clearance around the socket and CPU heatsink area.



A full-body shot of the Striker II Extreme with the SupremeFX II bundled sound card placed in the top PCI-E x1 port.



A close up shot of the lower right portion of the motherboard; check out the SATA and PATA connections, internal USB, front panel chassis connections, onboard on/off and reset switches and the south bridge heatsink.



It’s got three PCI-E x16 slots for full 3-way SLI support as well as two PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 – one of which gets knocked out for the SupremeFX II sound card bundled with the motherboard.



Here is one of the specifications that makes 790i stand out from the rest of the recent 6-series and 7-series nForce motherboards, with the 790i featuring full support for DDR3 memory.