Overclocking

The Striker motherboard is a high end motherboard and features top spec hardware and a powerful BIOS. Asus gives the enthusiast just about every possible tweaking option you could want. If you want overclocking look no further. This boards the daddy.

At first glance the Extreme Tweaker section would be quite bewildering to the novice which explains the preset overclocking options for the less experienced. After flashing the BIOS to the latest version, 1004, we had no trouble taking our 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor up to 3.33GHz with a 1333MHz front side bus at stock voltages. The maximum stable overclock for this particular CPU was 3.8GHz with extra voltage on the Vcore and North Bridge. The ASUS striker really loves the OCZ PC2-8500 memory and had no trouble running it at over 1200MHz at 5-5-5-15 timings.

Striker at 3.8Ghz

A quick scout round the forums reveals that similar overclocks are possible with aftermarket air cooling solutions. Dropping the multiplier of the CPU to 8 allowed us to push the FSB to 1900MHz with complete stability. We tried 1950MHz with lower multipliers but the board was not entirely happy. We didn't spend lots of time tweaking every last part of the BIOS but we are confident based on other user experiences, with extra effort it would be possible to push beyond 2000MHz on the FSB.
It's worth noting that some users have reported problems when using Corsair memory in the Striker and indeed other 680i chipsets. For this reason we do not recommend any Corsair memory for overclocking regardless of it's speed rating on any Intel platform - it just plain suxs and causes no end of grief in our experience. The only memory we find that consistently responds well to Intel platforms is OCZ memory. In the Striker motherboard, OCZ modules are without a doubt the very best choice and we can heartily recommend the PC2-8500 platinum range.

Check out the OCZ Memory - it loves the Striker!

We can safely say the Striker Extreme motherboard is a joy to overclock and lives up to it's claim as a hardcore overclocker. It's worth mentioning how easy it is to flash the BIOS thanks to the ASUS EZ Flash 2 utility. No need for floppy drives. Just pop a USB flash drive in with the BIOS you want flash and hit <ALT> <F2> during bootup. No more floppy drives or boot disks!

In The Labs

We ran a few tests to see how the 680i chipset stacks up against the 965 and 975 chipsets.  Don't worry we aren't going to bore you with a million and one file compression tests, mp3 encoding or every known FPS under the sun. Until Crysis and the next generation of direct X10 games come out, the hardware exceeds anything you could throw at it. And there isn't a whole lot to choose between them - the 965 and 975 chipsets are still strong performers - but the 680i pulls away in features and of course SLI support. It's also a very good overclocker and is miles ahead of the Intel chipsets in this respect.

For our tests we used an Intel E6700 as the brains and threw in some OCZ PC2-8500 and a 8800GTX for good measure. We used windows Vista Ultimate edition for our platform and the latest drivers we could get our hands on at the time. The Asus Striker performed brilliantly in Vista during our tests and you can now download good Vista drivers from the Asus website. We found the Striker 680i motherboard to perform a little better than our Asus P965 and Abit P975 motherboards. We didn't test SLI performance because that would be unfair to the old Intel chipsets. We will say that SLI works perfectly and provides a significant performance boost to games - a pair of 8800GTX cards will have no trouble running Oblivion full whack on a 30" monitor. Once the Striker was ramped up past stock settings it was like applying a nitro boost and big fat turbo! While it's not really fair to compare overclocked to stock (especially 3.8Ghz), the Striker is so damn easy to overclock we think you'd have to be raving mad not to turn up the juice to at least 1333MHz.

  

 

 

 

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