ASUS Striker Extreme review - Test configuration and setup
Author: Grga Curkovic
Date: 27 Dec 2006

After initial layout inspection we assembled a system and proceeded with software setup. The first step was checking out what this board?s BIOS has to offer and setting it up. We were a bit disappointed with the BIOS since the one we saw on EVGA left a much better impression. Though it has the same functionality as the EVGA one, there are some little things that are missing. It?s not like you will be handicapped compared to EVGA BIOS, but what we really liked on EVGA was the fact that it would show us the actual latencies of the memory, it would calculate the CPU clock before applying the settings. The level of detail found on the layout of the board is not present in BIOS settings. However, BIOS is just a piece of software and can be upgraded and developed so there is still hope ASUS will do something about this. The overclocking options are pretty much same as on EVGA board simply because they employ the same chipset. Apart from those little things, the BIOS is in place.

Our testbed was composed of the standard components we use for motherboard testing and therefore the results from our Conroe roundup and EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard review are comparable to this review. Those are:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 cooled with Zalman 9500
- OCZ Platinum EL XTC DDR2-8000 2x1GB
- NVIDIA 7900GTX
- OCZ PowerStream 600W
- WD Raptor 150GB

The CPU was working at default settings while we ran the memory on DDR2-800 4-4-4-12. Though this board is capable of higher memory speeds, we decided to go with this setup for our default batch of tests. We learned that increasing the memory speed without increasing the FSB speed will not bring you any benefit. Later on we?ll deal with overclocking and will cover memory and FSB overclocking. We ran our standard batch of tests and came up with lots of results that you can check out on the following pages.