ASUS Extreme Striker

Calling this one 'extreme' is a fair cop, for price and performance.

Apart from the elaborate maze of passive heatsinks, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is an upgraded version of the P5N32-SLI Premium we reviewed last month. In fact, it really is – it just features the new C55 northbridge that makes it a 680i board, and a few other choice baubles that apparently demand the ridiculous price of $500.

The Striker starts well – it shares the excellent NVIDIA 680i reference design, improves on it by making all the SATA ports parallel with the board, adds a better cooling system, a more easily removable battery and a clear CMOS button on top of the already expected power and reset buttons. Foolishly the single IDE port is still wedged behind the main power connector, making routing of cables annoying at best. Solid capacitors dot the board, ensuring longer life and more stable power delivery.

ASUS has broken the bog-ordinary ADI1988B audio chip onto a separate card again and branded it ‘SupremeFX’. Don’t believe the hype, it’s still onboard sound. The coax S/PDIF is a nice touch although realistically most gamers – who the board is aimed at – will never touch it, let alone the optical port.

Blue LEDs light up near expansion ports on the motherboard that may be a bit fiddly, such as USB, FireWire and the power pins. We say near the expansion ports, because they don’t do a particularly good job of lighting the area, meaning you may as well be startlingly innovative and, gasp, turn on the room light instead to set up your system.

A similar idea is on the back panel, with a blue-lit digital readout. While the lighting is spurious in its effectiveness, the data displayed when POSTing is invaluable in terms of spotting problems, and is infinitely friendlier than past two digit displays, or the Series-Of-Random-Beeps(TM). Big thumbs up to the ASUS lab
rats here.

A pair of dedicated eSATA ports sit on the back, rather than using NVIDIA’s pass-through idea, and otherwise the board maintains the usual slick ASUS build quality.

Unfortunately ASUS has opted to go with its own BIOS, which is nowhere near as intuitive or flexible as the default NVIDIA one. It’s actually a pretty standard BIOS, it’s just that we’ve grown so used to the great layout of the NVIDIA BIOS that most others now frustrate us.

Overclocking wise, we could hit a stable 3.575GHz with our X6800 – a good 125MHz less than its EVGA counterpart. Not exactly a huge difference, but considering the premium price you’d think it’d be able to at least match the reference NVIDIA board – an indication that lower clocked chips with higher ceilings may not overclock so well.

Ghost Recon: Advanced War Fighter and a Professional version of 3DMark06 are bundled in, yet despite the ‘free’ moniker we can’t help but feel in some way this has contributed to the cost of the package.

The Striker is a good board by pure virtue of its 680i heritage – just far too expensive. While we appreciate the originality, ASUS needs to reassess its kitchen sink mentality when aiming at gamers, and NVIDIA needs to find a way to lower its high end motherboard costs – this is getting beyond the point of tolerance. If you need a 680i board, get the EVGA instead, or if you must go ASUS, wait for the considerably cheaper P5N32-E-SLI.

	EVGA nForce 680-SLI	Asus Striker Extreme
Sandra Processor Arithmetic Dhrystone (MIPS)	27,100	27,159
Sandra Procssor Arithmetic Whetstone (MFLOPS)	18,593	18,580
Sandra Memory Bandwidth INT (MB/s)	5571	5775
Sandra Memory Bandwidth FLOAT (MB/s)	5637	5774
3DMark06	5259	5266