A lot of changes have taken place in the hardware and software market over the last few months. Microsofts brand new Vista operating system has debued onto our desktops with the direct X10 API promising incredible emmersive gaming experiences - see Crysis. NVIDIA's 680i  has firmly established itself as the best Core 2 Chipset offering mega features, proper SLI (direct x10 vista drivers are still in development but promised by the end of april) and fantastic overclocking abilities. For the hardware enthusiast it's a golden age of cheap Intel processors with huge overclocking potential. The 680i chipset was highly anticipated for it's rich feature set and promise of 'hardcore overclocker' status. Many manufacturers were keen to push reference motherboards out of the door with somewhat disappointing results - the EVGA 680i motherboard was plagued with problems at launch. Asus realising the importance of the 680i chipset decided to take their time and produce something very special.

The Striker Extreme motherboard represents extensive development and design to produce one of the most stunning non-reference 680i motherboards we have seen. Boasting the Republic of Gamers tag, Asus have lavished the best in hardware engineering, performance and innovative ideas to make the most exclusive and feature rich 680i motherboard on the planet. Don't believe us? Take a look at this motherboard eyecandy.

The board layout is suitably impressive. The huge cooling system keeps the hot parts of the board under control without the use of fans. It really is a sweet piece of work and looks great if you happen to have a window in your case. We hired Kobalt Computers to install some watercooling gear for our tests and the visual results are impressive - more of that in a special article soon.  The Asus Striker is an excellent candidate for watercooling setups.

The Finest 680i Ever Created!

Of course the Striker isn't the only motherboard to employ a passive cooling solution - EVGA's 680i and ASUS's P5N32-E SLI use similar solutions - but we can safely say the Striker heatpipes perform better. The 680i chipset does run hot, very hot, so don't go thinking the massive amount of metal is just for show. If you overclock or use watercooling you'll want to strap on the additional fan Asus provide to keep everything sweet and running as cool as possible. At first glance it looks a bit tight round the CPU socket but there is actually plenty of room for fitting huge coolers such as the Scythe Ninja and such beasts. It's a beautifully clean design in this respect. The rest of the layout is logical and perfect for those who want to go down the 8800 SLI route. In fact we'll go out on a limb and say it's one of the best board layouts we have seen for years.
At the heart of the Striker is the NVIDIA chipset. The nForce 680i chipset provides a total of 46 PCIe lanes along with the promise of extreme overclocking and further feature refinements over the previous 590 SLI chipset. Official FSB speeds of 1333MHz are supported along with DDR2 speeds up to 1200MHz. In theory that's peak bandwith of up to 19.2GB/s! In practice our OCZ PC2-8500 managed 1220MHz in this board and a new best for this particular sample. Asus's claim to support 1200MHz memory is well founded.  The nForce 680i SLI MCPs also support high-speed SLI ready memory.

Overclocking is one of the most impressive areas in the Striker motherboard and easily accomplished with the NVIDIA nTune utility that allows adjustment of key components from within the OS without rebooting. For the experts, Asus have strapped on their own Extreme Tweaker solution  to allow you to fine tune the CPU/memory voltage in great detail from within the BIOS. Up the FSB, tweak the voltages, adjust the memory settings and save your best overclocking profiles straight to the BIOS. The range of options is mind boggling with VCore voltages upto 1.9v (never try this high unless you have liquid nitrogen on tap) and memory up to 3.425V. A whole host of other voltage adjustments are present including the North Bridge, CPU VTT voltage and South Bridge. One of the best features of 680i motherboards is ablity to run your memory independent of the front side bus, so you can push your memory speed as far as you like and it won't affect the FSB.

There are a total of five options to overclocking. Manual, auto, standard, AI Overclock and AI NOS. For those enthusiasts that like things a little simpler, the AI NOS overclocking system auto detects the CPU loading and dynamically overclocks the CPU speed when needed. While not as powerful as manual tweaking, it's certainly very easy and provides a good performance boost only stressing your components when needed. If you want a more permanent solution the AI Tuning is your next best bet as it allows preset configuration options ranging from 5% overclock to 20% overclock (FSB 1200/800). Achieving a 20% overclock is really very easy with Core 2 Duo processors and even easier with the Asus Striker. All these options are great on paper but do they actually make the Asus Striker a good overclocker? Well more on that later but to wet your appetite we managed a nice stable 3.8GHz at 1900MHz from our 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

Other standard features of the 680i chipset include true 2x 16 PCI Express SLI support with two full bandwith 16 lane PCIe links, a third PCIe slot for graphics expansion, NVIDIA MediaSheild storage with advanced RAID and SATA support and USB 2.0 support for up to 10 USB devices.

The Striker offers a dual raid solution with NVIDIA mediashield offering RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1,5 and JBOD configurations for up to six SATA 3.0GB/s drives. The silicon image 3132 controller supports two additional external SATA 3.0GB/s ports on the rear panel and allows RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD. External SATA ports are becoming a must have feature wth more external storage devices opting for this method of connection over the slower USB and Firewire solutions.

Of course the Striker offers dual Gigabit LAN and is S/PDIF digital sound ready. Well that's about it for features. Hang on a minute. We haven't even mentioned the 8 phase capless power design for ultimate overclocking capability and reliability. The fanless design using Asus's gorgeous heat pipe heatsink that allows multi-directional heat flow from major thermal sources in the motherboard to lower system temperature. The LCD poster that displays boot error messages instead of codes so you can easily hunt down troublesome devices. The onboard leds located near connector labels allowing you to connect cables and devices without a flashlight. What about the onboard switches for overclockers to provide an easy way of turning on, resetting and clearing the cmos while fine tuning performance. We could also mention the ASUS multi-language BIOS, Q-Fan plus technology, ASUS MyLogo3 to personalize your system with boot logos, ASUS music alarm to wake you up in the morning and the Supreme FX features to enhance speech applications like Skype and online gaming but we are just itching to show you some eyecandy!

Striker With The Wet Stuff

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.

  

 

 

 

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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