ASUS STRIKER EXTREME
Article Index:
11-15 (Previous Page)
16. WinRAR, Doom 3, & Quake 4 OC Results
17. Conclusion
XVI. WINRAR, DOOM 3 & QUAKE 4 OC RESULTS
This is what I like to see!
The ASUS Striker, when overclocked, started showing some improvement with the WinRAR data compression benchmark test, also making significant strides forward in Doom 3 and Quake 4. The Striker may not take first place in these all important gaming benchmarks, but it improved significantly when overclocked.
So what sort of conclusion can we begin to draw with regards to the ASUS Striker Extreme edition motherboard, the NVIDIA 680i chipset, the stock performance figures, and the final overclock achieved?
I'll start with the obvious.
The ASUS Striker Extreme is one hell of a beautiful motherboard. It's built like a brick house, near perfectly designed, and boasts a number of unique features. ASUS also bundled more hardware/software with the Striker than most motherboard manufacturers would ever consider. You certainly get your dollars worth with the Striker.
But as for performance, there was something lacking. I would have liked to have seen some far better figures in the stock testing, but can surmise as to why I didn't. I had tested the ASUS Striker with the initial 1004 BIOS it had shipped with. During my testing phase of this review, I did discover (somewhere in my digital wanderings) a BETA BIOS for the Striker. Of course I wanted to try it (despite the obvious risks inherent within), but never got the opportunity.
When finishing up the last bits or writing for this review (all of the testing and overclocking completed), I read a few forum threads from a few different sites that had ASUS Striker owners complaining of the latest BIOS release (version 1102). Apparently, this new BIOS had turned their system into a very expensive paper weight. It didn't kill the motherboard (or any attached hardware) mind you, and was easily remedied by re-flashing the BIOS to the earlier version. Scary when stuff like that happens, isn't it?
But this brings me to my driving point.
The Striker is great, the 680i chipset is nice, but the drivers suck. NVIDIA has to hammer out a better 680i BIOS, and iron out some of those chipset communications conundrums. Once ASUS gets their hands on an improved BIOS, they take their time augmenting and testing it before they release it for the Striker.
Don't get me wrong, I like the 680i chipset very much, but I do feel that it is still very immature. It really needs some time to grow.
On another note, there have been reports of some super Strikers out there, in some figurative sense. For what I achieved with roughly a 450 MHz FSB (450x4=1800), I was pretty happy. But I have heard of some folks hitting 500 MHz, and some even reaching 520 or 530 MHz. It seems that there may be some production discrepancies that ASUS isn't completely aware of. It's not like certain runs of the Striker are better than others, but that every so often, one Striker board will out preform the rest. There's many parts of the tech industry that are like that, and we'll have to live with those unexpected surprises/tearful disappointments for a while longer.
At about $330 bucks USD on-line, it is quite the investment. But considering that it will handle SLI with the dual 16x PIC-e slots, that's a big selling point. The third PCI-e 8x slot for physics calculations is another benefit. And the bundle alone is almost all the excuse you need to buy the Striker. It may not have the brute strength bandwidth of an Intel chipset based board, but data compression and memory throughput isn't everything.
The ASUS Striker Extreme edition motherboard is great, and given time, it'll get even better.