ASUS Striker Extreme review - Layout, thoughts
Author: Grga Curkovic
Date: 28 Dec 2006

The layout of this board is similar to NVIDIA reference design at first look, but when you spend some time staring at the board you come to realize that there are many differences. Generally speaking, al the mayor components are in the same areas of the board, but the fact that both NVIDIA and ASUS choose similar layout tells us it probably is the best one. One of the biggest differences is the cooling system. ASUS? solution looks much better since there are 3 pretty big heat sinks all connected with a system of heat pipes. They cool northbridge, southbridge and PWM area of the board. Since we experienced some heat problems on EVGA while using water cooling (the airflow over PWM area was insufficient to cool down the FETs) we welcome ASUS? decision to install a more powerful cooling solution. That is the biggest difference to NVIDIA reference design. The board feature 8 phase voltage stabilization and therefore should have no stability problems even while the processor is significantly overclocked. This board is full of LEDs of all kinds. When the computer is turned off there are a dozen blue LEDs on the bottom of the board so the board looks like a Xmas tree (marry Christmas to everyone BTW). The power and reset buttons integrated on board have backlight so you don?t have to come close to the board to tell the apart. The back panel has a LED that comes on when you push a button on the back panel so you won?t be guessing where the connectors are when you are trying to plug something in the dark. The back panel also features a graphical monochromatic post LCD so you don?t need to open the case if you get stuck during post. Those features are cool, but when it comes to choosing a well lit board that is an underperformer, or an ugly green one that performs better, we will always choose the ugly green one, so all this coolness will not affect our final verdict much. The board all the layout benefits NVIDIA mentioned when they launched nForce 680i SLI like 3 PCI Express x16 slots (the top and the bottom one are x16 electrical while the middle one is x8 electrical), the fact that you can replace memory modules without having to remove the graphics card and so on. There are also some features we didn?t see on NVIDIA reference design board like thermal sensors. There are 3 thermal sensor headers on board that can be used to measure temperature at various devices. The sensors, of course, are included in the bundle. The back panel features LCD poster, 2 PS/s ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF output, 2 eSATA, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port and onboard LED switch. Apart from those, the board features a whole bunch of internal connectors; 3 USB headers supporting 6 USB2.0 ports, 6 SATA connectors, a FireWire port and S/PDIF output and 8 fan headers (one for CPU, one for the optional fan and 6 additional ones). Unlike EVGA?s board that has some resistors on the back side that will give you a headache when you try to install anything but a stock cooler, the back side of this board is clear and installation of Zalman 9500 went smooth.