ASUS STRIKER EXTREME
Article Index:
1. Introduction
2. The Chipset
3. Board Impressions
4. Bundled Hardware
5. The BIOS
6-10 (Next Page)
I. INTRODUCTION
Once in a proverbial blue moon, a piece of hardware comes along that promises to be within a league all its own. Such is the case with the ASUS Striker Extreme Edition motherboard. For what I do, I have to keep on top of the latest and greatest in hardware. Whether it be the launch of a new chipset, new and improved memory modules, or wicked fast processors, I do my homework.
I've read a lot about the ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard lately, and I've been rubbing my hands together in eager anticipation of this. I have the chance to review what many regard to be the fastest mother board on the planet.
Built upon the new NVIDIA 680i chipset, the Striker is a member of ASUS' new Military-themed motherboards. That's not to say ASUS has switched to a camouflage PCB, but names like 'Striker' and 'Commando' serve to suggest that these new boards are performers.
So without any further adieu, let's set our sights on the Striker. I want to get this soldier moving.
II. THE CHIPSET
The ASUS Striker Extreme has been built around the NVIDIA 680i chipset -- the most powerful and feature filled of the NVIDIA 600-series chipsets. The NVIDIA 680i chipset is relatively new, and is making great strides towards becoming the choice chipset for extreme gamers and hardware enthusiasts looking for the SLI performance advantage.
ASUS has bestowed the Striker Extreme Edition motherboard with the notable 'Republic of Gamers' tag. Though it may be simple marketing on the part of ASUS -- a simple hope to capture the interest of gamers -- those ASUS boards that have been dubbed with that definitive distinction 'Republic of Gamers' do tend to be among some of the top performers ASUS has to offer.
The following diagram serves to illustrate the basic architecture of the NVIDIA 680i chipset.
So let's take a quick look at what features the NVIDIA 680i chipset has to offer, and whether or not ASUS has taken full advantage of them with the Striker Extreme motherboard.
| NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI | NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI | NVIDIA nForce 650i Ultra | |
| Segment | Enthusiast SLI | Performance SLI | Performance |
| Socket | Intel Socket 775 | Intel Socket 775 | Intel Socket 775 |
| CPU | Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX |
Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX |
Core 2 Extreme (dual and quad core) Core 2 Quad Core 2 Duo Celeron D Pentium 4 Pentium D 9XX Pentium D 8XX |
| FSB (MHz) | 1333* MHz | 1066 MHz | 1066 MHz |
| Extreme FSB Overclocking | Best | Good | Good |
| NVIDIA SLI™ Technology | Yes 2 x16 |
Yes 2 x8 |
No |
| Third PCIe Graphics Expansion Slot | Yes | No | No |
| SLI-Ready Memory (MHz) with EPP | 1200 MHz | - | - |
| JEDEC DDR2 Memory (MHz) | 800 MHz | 800 MHz | 800 MHz |
| NVIDIA LinkBoost™ technology | Yes | No | No |
| PCI Express | |||
# Lanes |
46 lanes | 18 lanes | 18 lanes |
# Links |
9 links | 4 links | 3 links |
Configuration |
16, 16, 8, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 | 8, 8, 1, 1 or 16, 1, 1 |
16, 1, 1 |
| SATA/PATA drives | 6/2 | 4/4 | 4/4 |
| SATA speed | 3Gb/s | 3Gb/s | 3Gb/s |
| RAID | 0,1,0+1,5 | 0,1,0+1,5 | 0,1,0+1,5 |
| NVIDIA MediaShield™ Storage Technology | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Native Gigabit Ethernet Connections | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| NVIDIA FirstPacket™ technology | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| NVIDIA DualNet® technology | Yes | No | No |
Teaming |
Yes | No | No |
TCP/IP Acceleration |
Yes | No | No |
| NVIDIA nTune™ Utility | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| USB ports | 10 | 8 | 8 |
| PCI Slots | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Audio | HDA (Azalia) | HDA (Azalia) | HDA (Azalia) |
I've used this particular table before, and I do find it to be quite the handy tool for distinguishing between the different flavours of the NVIDIA 600-series chipsets. In terms of what NVIDIA 600 series chipset based boards we've touched upon before, both the MSI P6N SLI Platinum (nice, but needs a re-design) and the ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus (runs hotter than the surface of the sun) were some of the recent NVIDIA 650i SLI chipset-based boards we've reviewed. As for the 680i series, the Gigabyte 6-Quad N680SLI-DQ6 (first BIOS sucked, second BIOS rocked, all the drivers need work) and the Abit IN9 32X-MAX (needs a new BIOS, but a great tweakers board) both had some pretty good potential.
It's obvious that the 680i SLI chipset from NVIDIA does have potential -- that much is certain. So I'm going to take a moment to go over some of the NVIDIA 680i SLI chipset features as they pertain to the ASUS Striker Extreme Edition motherboard.
It looks like the Asus Striker Extreme motherboard does take full advantage of the NVIDIA 680i SLI chipset. There are those little extras, like the NVIDIA FastPacket technology (better network communications) and NVIDIA MediaShield (data protection) that are the icing on the already big cake, but the the base for a performance system is there, thanks to the 680i SLI chipset.
And here we have the NVIDIA 680i northbridge sitting up north, and the MCP55 southbridge, a very feature rich chip, down below. Perhaps now we'll take a gander at the ASUS Striker Extreme Edition motherboard itself.
In terms of design, the Asus Striker Extreme motherboard is of a very typical nature. A CPU socket here, memory goes there, so on and so forth. Let's take a closer at the finer details of this board.
Everything looks to be pretty normal. I like the layout.
The Striker has room for up to six SATA drives, one parallel port channel, and one floppy connector. The vertical style of SATA ports does save some room on the motherboard when compared to the horizontial flat style of port, but does make it more difficult to connect a SATA cable when the board is mounted in the case and you can't see the port. The parallel port is in a bit of an odd location, sitting right beind the 24 pin motherboard power connector, making for a very tight squeeze.
In terms of additional I/O ports, the Asus Striker comes with the usual complement of front panel pin headers for power, reset, hard drive activity and the like (top picture). We also get a IEEE1394 FireWire pin header (in red) with the front panel audio pin headers right next to it. In the right most picture, we find two USB2.0 pin header ports in bright blue.
There is also this lone USB2.0 port (blue base) sitting up next to the 1x slot (the one reserved for the audio expansion card). For front panel USB ports, or an optional rear D-Brachet perhaps.
The optional audio expansion card is a SupremeFX Audio addition that utilizes the ADI 1988 8-channel High Definition Audio Codec. It's nice, but the use of electrolytic capacitors rather than soild states is a bit of a mystery. Regardless, it should sound great.
The Asus Striker Extreme also comes with surface mounted Power, Reset, and Clear CMOS buttons (in order from left to right). Very nice for us hardware testers, not having to jumper a motherboard to life with a screwdriver. I would have liked a skull and crossbones button for the Clear CMOS button, but the label is good enough. :-) Oh, and they glow too.
In the rear, there is the standard gamut of I/O ports, and a few little extras.
A nice complement of additional ports. Yes, some are incredibly standard, like the PS2 and USB ports, but some of these additons are very nice.
Check out that LCD POST display. It's backlit, and can register the POST sequence when booting, very handy. But it can also programed (through the BIOS) with a user defined string of characters (uppercase letters and numbers only, no puncuations or symbols allowed). It would be nice if it scrolled some userr defined text, but it doesn't. Perhaps ASUS can unlock some of its more advanced feaures with a BIOS update or two. Hint, hint ASUS!
A rear panel FireWire port isn't unheard of, but they are usually relegated to a D-Bracket. Don't worry, ASUS tossed in some D-Brackets, and we'll look at those come the bundled hardware page. But that one extra FireWire port is nice.
That child safety switch, as I have come to term it ... that's an odd one. Its purpose is to cut all power to the motherboard, except for a series of blue surface mounted warning LEDs. It is intended to prevent any short circuits from occuring during the instalation/removal of hardware. You could always unplug the power supply, let the residiual current within it drain for 5 to 10 minutes (actually takes a minute or less).
I have to say ... without a doubt these are the craziest heatpipes I've ever seen. They are considerablly larger than typical heatpipe systems. The three heatsinks around the CPU socket help to cool the MOSFETS (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors) for the VCM (Voltage Controler Module) as they regulate the CPU voltages. The 1/4" copper heat pipe tubing then swoops around the CPU socket zone to a huge heatsink on the Northbridge chipset. That then branches off to the Southbridge cooler -- the one with that 'Republic of Gamers' tag on it.
This is one heck of a setup, and it does cool incredibly well, but there is an issue or two that I have to touch upon. First, that thermal gum is a cheap alternative to that can't even begin to compare with a quality thermal paste. But the real issue is the physical obstruction caused by all this heatpipe plumbing.
As you can see in the above picture, our Noctua NH-U12 CPU cooler is a little big, and it is scraping against one of the VCM heatsinks. This oversized heatpipe system could cause some headaches for end users as an aftermarket cooling solution may not fit properlly. Most will, but some may not.
But one big interference was noted when I had to disassemble the Striker ever so briefly. I had noticed that the casings for one of the Ferrite cores surrounding the CPU socket was cracked. What happened here?
Turns out that the Noctua NH-U 12 tensioning screw was to blame. Seems that the threaded portion of the screw extends just a little too far and had impacted the Ferrite core casing, chipping it ever so slightly. Perhaps I should file down the end of that screw, just to be safe. Poor soldier, wounded in action.
Time to see what goodies ASUS included with the Striker.
It is typical of ASUS to bundle ample amounts of extra software and hardware with their motherboards and other PC hardware products. It seems especially true of their high end enthusiast hardware, thus making it true of the Striker. Asus tossed in a lot of goodies, and we'll take a few minutes to discuss all of them.
That's a lot!
And it comes in this nice box too.
Manuals and disks, the most basic bundled portion of any motherboard purchase.
A very extensive software collection, and the manual is pretty nice too. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (a.k.a. GRAWs) is a pretty sweet game, and having it bundled with the Striker sort of goes with that Military naming scheme ASUS is after. The Striker Software DVD is pretty hefty, so I'll just detail its contents in point form.
DRIVERS
UTILITIES
There's also the Make Disk Utilities for creating SATA and RAID driver floppy disks for use during system instalation. Furthermore, there's also an NVIDIA RAID User's Guide, an NVIDIA ForceWare Networking Administrator's Guide for advanced networking features, and an Sil3132 User' Guide for additional SATA driver and RAID configuration. A very thorough DVD.
A great bonus is the the option to build a SATA or RAID disk from booting off the DVD (avoiding the need for an OS to be installed -- a chicken and egg problem). Just leave the DVD in the drive, fire up the system, and you'll be presented with a few options for building a SATA or RAID floppy disk. Well done ASUS!
Six SATA cables and power adapters. That's enough to fill up every SATA port on this board. We also get an ATA133 cable and a floppy drive cable. A nice complement thus far.
A couple of D-Brackets to complement the already robust rear I/O panel. We get another IEEE1394 FireWire port, and two more USB2.0 ports. You can also see how ASUS color coded the pin blocks on the cable ends, so we'll know exactlly where to plug them in on the motherboard.
Every motherboard comes with a rear I/O shield. But this one is unique. Not only is it well built and very sturdy (most are really quite flimsy), but it also has this little power cord that plugs into the motherboard. Why? Cause this thing glows in the dark! The I/O shield for the Striker uses a form of electroluminescent plastic to shed a little light on the situation.
There's an auxiliary chipset fan too, and three temperature probes.
This little fan is nice -- it's pretty quiet, and does aid in cooling somewhat. In my experiences though, these auxiliary fans rarely reduce tempatures by anything more than a couple of degrees Celcius. It's also murder to remove, and when in place, prevents us from using one of Noctua NH-U 12 cpu coolers. As for the temperature probes, they are of a thermistor-type, measuring the resistence incurred in the probe during temperature change. There are three connectors on the motherboard for their attachment (see picture above). This is a very thoughtful addition on behalf of ASUS.
The temperature probes connect at one of three locations, indicated by the label OPT_TEMP. In the motherboard picture above, it's the top right two pins that accept the temperature probe.
This is nice. It's a quick connect terminal block for the front case panel buttons and lights. It's far easier to hook all those little pins up to these blocks, and then clip the block onto the motherboard front panel pin headers. Now if they could only do the same for the front panel audio pin headers, that would be nice.
A SoundMax Directional microphone. It even comes with some adhesive velcro strips to attach it to the top of an LCD (or CRT) monitor.
A great big SLI bridge. A must for any NVIDIA chipset-based motherboard, obviously.
Some tie wraps for taming wires. A cheap item, but useful never the less. Note: I had to take this picture against the Striker box because photographing white on white is quite difficult.
And finally, add a little ASUS to your life with an ASUS case badge and key chain dongle.
Well, that about rounds up a very extensive bundle. Time to move onto the BIOS.
As with the rest of the Striker Extreme motherboard, ASUS did a wonderful job designing the BIOS. Not only is it very user friendly and quite intuitive, but it also boasts enough tweaks to have even the biggest hardware enthusiasts drooling all over their keyboard. Best place to start is with the boot screen logo.
The graphical boot screen is pretty simple, and that Republic of Gamers tag seems to be ASUS' new trademark calling-card. Now I could show you the verbose (text) boot screen, but it flew by too quick for me to get a decent screenshot. It's just a bunch of checks for the memory and storage devices. Not too exciting, so we won't bother with that.
Here's our main system screen. ASUS chose to use the Phoenix Award BIOS system, which was a good choice. The Award system is far easier to navigate than the AMI system, which coincidentally isn't very popular anymore from what I've seen.
The Extreme Tweaker page holds tweaks for the chipset, memory, CPU, graphics, and an automated overclocking feature. The A.I. Overclocking Options pane gives the user the choice of bumping system performance by 5, 10, 15, or 20 percent over stock. The N.O.S. Overclocking Options allow for automated system speed increases of 3, 5, 8, and 10 percent. Both are a simple method of adding a little extra gas to your rig, but we'd rather O.C. this beast manually. Right?
For our FSB overclocking, we can choose any whole number between 533MHz and 3000MHz. But keep in mind that this figure is actually a multiple of the actual FSB frequency. Case in point would be the FSB limit of 3000MHz, which actually translates to 3000/4, for an actual FSB speed of 750MHz. But we probably won't see a 750MHz FSB, unless I break out the liquid nitrogen.
For the DDR2 memory speeds, we can choose any whole number value between 400MHz and 2600MHz. For our testing purposes, I used our standard Corsair TWIN2X1024 PC-8500 DDR2 memory, running at 4-4-4-12/2T 800MHz speeds. We will, of course, be overclocking a little later on.
There are a number of tweaks in the Overclocking section of the BIOS, but the most useful of those is the CPU Multiplier. Now, odd as this sounds, we can choose any multiplier figure between 6 and 50.
But don't expect your Core2 to run at a 50x multiplier. Some older Intel chips do have higher CPU multipliers. Case in point being the Pentium D series of processors, in which some do boast a multiplier reaching up to 25. But unfortunately, the retail Core2 and Quad Core chips Intel builds have locked multipliers of 6, 7, and 8. So unless you're running an older LGA775 chip, or you have an unlocked engineering sample straight from the labs at Intel, we're stuck with these three multipliers.
The rest of the overclocking section involves tiny little tweaks and tunes, and are best left to the end user to explore.
Being able to set voltage levels is always nice, and ASUS pulled out all the stops here. We have the ability to tweak these following voltages. I could have snapped pictures of all the voltage settings, but those menus scrolled on forever. So, here's a quick sampling of what ranges we're provided with.
Very impressive, though tweaking the memory reference voltages is something that won't make an extraordinary difference.
Again, with these memory timing settings, it's the tCL (CAS Latency), tRCD, tRP, tRAS, and Command Per Clock rate (CMD) that give the biggest punch. All of those advanced memory settings are nice, but they're more for experimentation purposes. Yes they can make a small difference, but it's those first five settings that make nearly all the difference.
In the Advanced section we have a number of little options for the likes of our IDE and SATA devices, LAN, and other little things. There's also the settings for the rear LCD POST display that was referenced earlier. This is where you can type in your own user string to be displayed, or just have the display show diagonistic messages. The LCD backlight can be controlled here too.
Wake on LAN, wake with mouse movement, wake from keyboard ... tons of options here. I chose to wake by power button. :-)
Temperature monitors are nice, but since the CPU is not issued a HLT instruction when in the BIOS, CPU temperatures will register hotter than in a normal situation. It's far wiser to take readings from the desktop utility ASUS provides. Fan speed control, monitoring, and warning settings are all present here as well.
Temperature monitors for those three temperature probes ASUS bundled are also present here.
I don't think I have to explain this.
ASUS Music Alarm to turn your PC into an alarm clock. Wake up to your favoriate CD! It's the most expensive alarm clock in the world!
ASUS O.C. Profile is nice. It allows the user to save all of their BIOS settings to one of two different profiles. There is some limitation though. First, there are only two profiles that you can save to. Some time ago, I had reviewed the Abit Fatal1ty motherboard. It was a pretty sweet AM2 board, and it had the capability of saving up to five different BIOS profiles. Furthermore, the Fatal1ty allowed the user to choose a name for the profile they saved, where as the Striker doesn't -- you just pick profile one or profile two. ASUS could do a lot better with this.
The Asus EZ Flash 2 utility is a little more advanced though. It's a shell enviroment you can enter into that allows for the backup and flashing of your BIOS. I guess one could always save multiple BIOS images (to their hard drive or a thumb drive), which could constitute multiple profiles. And yes, the Striker will recognize a SATA, IDE, USB drives, and or thumb drives from the BIOS too -- a big plus in my books. Updating the BIOS with a floppy disk is so ten years ago.
I could spend way more time on the Striker BIOS than I need to, but can simply sum it all up by saying that it's great, I love it, there's more tweaks than you'll ever need, and not much else could be done to improve upon it.
Time to save our changes and exit.
NEXT: VI. TEST SETUP & BENCHMARKS