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Asus Striker Extreme

Posted 03/29/07 at 06:41:46 PM  by Gordon Mah Ung

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How much of a badass mother is Asus’s new motherboard? It’s so bad that it doesn’t even use numbers in its name. Yeah, there’s no R2-D2-like naming convention here. Just call it Striker Extreme, or El Extremerino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

The Extreme isn’t just about marketing shtick though. Asus has integrated some pretty compelling features into this nForce 680i–based Intel Core 2 motherboard that we hadn’t seen before. The best example of this is the LCD poster. Instead of providing a cryptic POST message, the Extreme features a small LCD display that gives you info in plain English.

The I/O shield features electroluminescent lighting, so you can see where your USB or PS/2 ports are. And there are even LEDs that can be safely activated when you work around your PC with it turned off. It’s scary to muck with parts while the LEDs are lit, but if you push a switch on the back of the board, it cuts power to USB, RAM, and the add-in slots, so you can remove or add components without damaging anything.

More important though, the Extreme gives you more usable slots. With two double-width GPUs installed, there are still enough slots to add a PCI soundcard and a PCI-E card. The onboard sound, which features SoundMax codecs, is even passable. There’s no EAX support, but SoundMax still sounds better than the Realtek parts.

On the performance front, the Extreme edges the two Intel-based boards by a small margin and comes up short only in FEAR, which tells us something is screwy with the nForce 680i chipset and FEAR. All three nForce-based boards we’ve looked at recently trailed their Intel counterparts in FEAR when run at low resolutions. Everywhere else, this mobo came up smelling of roses.

So what’s wrong? The price. The board lists at about $330 and was going for $100 more than list as we went to press. That’s not Asus’s fault though. You can’t blame the company for what others are willing to charge for such a damned sexy beast.

Click to Enlarge

An LCD display that tells you in English what’s going on at POST makes this Asus motherboard outstanding.

Asus Striker Extreme
www.asus.com
plus
THE UNTOUCHABLES

Plain-English POST display and useful LED lighting.

minus
ZARDOZ

Price, are you serious?

BENCHMARKS
  Asus Striker Extreme
Chipset nVidia 680i SLI
Clock 2.93GHz
SiSoft XI (MB/s) 5,518
Quake 4 1280x1024 (fps) 148.0
3DMark2001 SE 46,688
3DMark03 25,692
3DMark05 11,490
3dMark06 6,382
3DMark06 CPU 2,608
FEAR 1.07 Min/Max (fps) 276
PC Mark 2005 Overall 8,188
PC Mark 2005 RAM 6,197
PC Mark 2005 GPU 9,210
PC Mark 2005 HDD 6,142
Valve Particle Test 54

Best scores are bolded. We used a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 Dominator RAM, a Western Digital 400GB SATA drive, a GeForce 7900GTX card, and a 1KW PC Power and Cooling PSU for all three motherboards.

COMMENTS:8
TAGS: asus, motherboards, march 2007, hardware, from the magazine, reviews, striker extreme, build a pc
COMMENTS
avatarThis board really, really sucks!!!

Submitted by spplutchok on Mon, 08/18/2008 - 11:15am

Constant CPU Init errors

Takes forever to post to Windows

Often hangs on startup

Miserable OC experience with Q6600

DDR2 memory requirements finicky

My most expensive board and worst experience.

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avatarThis board sucks.

Submitted by teikyo30 on Sun, 02/17/2008 - 1:15pm

"Wherever you go, there you are."
---buckaroo bonzai

I bought the hype and bought the board. It's a great board if you leave it alone. Try to overclock it and it locks up tight. I had to reset the cmos, something the board said it didn't have to do. Funny how it still had the jumper and the clear cmos button. Seems to me if it's supposed to automatically reset in case of error you wouldn't need that feature.

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avatarSpeedy

Submitted by eddieddie on Mon, 11/26/2007 - 9:20am

Has been recommended by many of my gaming friends.
I will soon own this speedy motherboard.

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avatarJunk

Submitted by rimor12 on Thu, 11/15/2007 - 1:16am

Continued bios revisions still fails to provide a pleasant experience for most users. CPU_Init and cmos-err errors abound and rma takes over three weeks.

This board is like poker, you may get a good hand once in awhile but the odds are with the house.

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avatarthe price is high but...

Submitted by WildTurkey101 on Thu, 08/16/2007 - 8:42pm

I recently bought this board and it was a bit pricey, but I'm happy with my purchase. I have one question about it though, I haven't installed the sound board because I have an extreme music, which has little or no useful functionality in Vista.

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avatarExtreme Overclocking

Submitted by retpcrx on Fri, 07/13/2007 - 9:49pm

Is ASUS hoping for a bigger share of the gaming market? This is a fair board that is not worth the bucks. Even after 3 months of continued BIOS development this board still lacks full memory support. Beside the lack of BIOS support the filters surrounding the CPU socket make it impossible to use the stock cooling system provided by INTEL. Save yourself some money and opt for the P5N32 instead.

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avatarstupidongpinoy

Submitted by stupidongpinoy on Fri, 04/13/2007 - 4:34am

damn that mobo!!!! a hot rod but a hot price for this work of art

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avatar Nice but not worth the price

Submitted by Tobyrama on Tue, 04/03/2007 - 6:55am

Nice board and layout, but not for that much money =) I'll stick with my 650i.

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