The Bottom Line 

We could probably rave on for hours about how good this motherboard is. Did we say good? Superb more like. Asus have made an astonishing motherboard for the 680i chipset. They have significantly improved upon the NVIDIA reference design to create a muscle powered monster board. Make no mistake, this is design and engineering brilliance. The attention to detail is astonishing. For socket 775 processors, this is the number one motherboard on the market and our number choice for Quad Core and Core 2 Duo systems.

Overclocking is phenomenal and with support for 1333MHZ FSB and DDR2-1200 speeds as standard, the Striker is most future proof motherboard out there. Overclocking is now within the reach of the masses thanks to Asus's clever Extreme Tweaker features. For their pros there is every advanced feature you could think of to tweak it till it burns. Don't be suprised if you  reach 1900+ FSB and 1200MHZ DDR2 speeds with some decent aftermarket kit. While our benchmarks showed that with one graphics card there isn't a huge degree of improvement at stocks speeds over the older Intel chipsets, strap in another card for SLI and you'll start to see things really fly. Imagine Crysis running on the Striker with a pair of Asus EN8800GTX graphics cards. Oh Mama! The product bundle is fat with plenty of cables, great instruction manuals, loads of decent software including 3DMark 06 Advanced Edition, Kaspersky Anti-Virus and a copy of Ghost Recon.

Of course there is a downside to something this great. The board is expensive. It'll cost you over a couple of hundred pounds for admission but we think that's a small price to pay for something this good. If you want the very best this is it. To hell with the cost!

Full marks and a gold award for the Striker Extreme.

Special thanks to Asus for giving us the opportunity to sample this motherboard. For more information on this and other Asus products, please visit the Asus website.

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