ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks
by Kris Boughton on April 11, 2008 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
It's getting expensive…
We have never been keen on paying more than necessary when it comes to assembling the right parts for our systems, and we would not expect readers to be any different. That is unless you enjoy spending money for the sake of it. Discerning buyers know the difference between good deals and marketing hype; for those looking for more details, that's what we'll provide. In particular, the rising price of what could be described as "extreme performance motherboards" has garnered the attention and concern of more than a few gaming and overclocking enthusiasts.
Some have speculated that it was only a matter of time before the costs of these components finally caught up with the inflated pricing structure now shared by top-end GPUs and CPUs. Still others feel as if they are simply paying more today than ever before - and they would be right, especially on this platform that doubles the credit card crunch with DDR3 memory. What we may forget is the massive research and development costs associated with new product introductions are typically frontloaded when it comes to suggested retail pricing.
The last few quarters have played host to an unprecedented number of new product launches. Innovation and advancement have come at an ever-increasing, almost alarming rate - so much that we sometimes have trouble covering it all. In other words, more today than ever before, you are going to pay to be on the cutting edge of technology. With an MSRP of $399 the ASUS Striker II Extreme is no exception.
Just a small taste of things to come…
Does NVIDIA's newest 790i MCP really help the ASUS Striker II Extreme provide the significant performance boost needed to substantiate its almost exorbitant cost? Unfortunately, our response is not quite as straightforward as we would like - we can certainly tell you what the board is capable of, and assuming you are well versed in the black art of overclocking, what you can expect performance wise. What we cannot answer is whether this justifies the added expense. All we can say is that this is an expensive path. However, we will do everything in our power to provide you with the information you need to make this determination for yourself.
With the recent arrival of PC games like Crysis - and rest assured, we will see more releases in the coming months/years that are just as graphics intensive - technologies like NVIDIA's Quad-SLI and AMD/ATI's CrossFireX (CFX) may become even more important. Choosing a board that supports either one of these standards might be an important consideration to factor into your next motherboard purchasing decision. That said, assuming driver programming is up to par and multi-GPU performance scaling is acceptable, the ASUS Striker II Extreme promises to offer a gaming experience like no other at this time.
Join us as we take a closer look at its construction, layout, and standard feature set.
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takumsawsherman - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
But for $400, you only get Firewire 400. Is that like a key, or something? If we pay $800 for a board, will they finally feel as though they can afford to add Firewire800, as Gigabyte did on their $200 boards like 3 or 4 years ago?When they talk about adding firewire itself to a board, does it never occur to them that a faster variation has existed for 5 or 6 years now? How insulting.
Grandpa - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
It doesn't matter what the price, performance, make, or model. If the board is unstable I don't want it! I had an Abit board once with a VIA chipset. It corrupted data when large files were transferred between drives. Several BIOS updates later, with the performance down to a crawl, it still corrupted data. Because of that ugly bad memory, stability is number one important for me. So this review is very relevant to others like myself.Super Nade - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
As far as I know, the capacitors you mention are made by Fujitsu's Media division (FP-Cap series), not Fairchild semiconductor. Fujitsu did try to gobble up Fairchild in the 80's, but the US government killed the deal. Apart from this, I am not aware of any connection between these two companies.Here is the link--> http://jp.fujitsu.com/group/fmd/en/services/capaci...">http://jp.fujitsu.com/group/fmd/en/services/capaci...
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Stele - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
Super Nade's right. The vendor marking on the capacitors - which have been the same for almost all such solid electrolytic polymer caps used on Asus boards for some time now - is very much that of Fujitsu: a letter 'F' in Courier-esque font between two horizontal lines.Interestingly - and confusingly - however, once upon a time this logo was indeed that of Fairchild Semiconductor... the deal that almost happened in the 80s may have something to do with Fujitsu's current use of the said logo. Either way, Faichild Semi have long since changed to their current logo (a stylised italic 'f') so today, any current/new electronic/semiconductor component carrying the F-between-bars logo is almost certainly a Fujitsu product.
jojo29 - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Just wondering how the Anandtech's Choice P5E3 Premium ( which i plan on buying) stacks up against this Striker? Any comments? Or did i miss something in the aricle as i was only able to skim through it, as im at work atm, and dontcoughwantcoughtogetcaughtbymybosscough...kjboughton - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
We used one X48 motherboard in this review and it was the ASUS P5E3 Premium. Enjoy the full read when you make it home. ;)ImmortalZ - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
You mention that overclocking the PCI-E bus provided tangible performance benefits on the EVGA board.Did you read about the rumblings around the net about some G92 based cards overclocking their GPU with the PCI-E bus? There are supposedly two clock sources for these type of cards - one on board and the other slaved to the PCI-E bus.
Are you sure that the performance improvement is not because of this anomaly?
CrystalBay - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Hi Kris, while UT3 does scale very well with multi-core. The game it self has no DX10 support as of yet. Hopefully EPIC will will enable it in a future update...Glenn - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
All the benchies and comparisons are great, but how does it compare to a P35 board? A 965 or X38 board? I doubt you will convert those that already own an X48 and I (P35) have no point of reference within this article to see if I'm 5, 10 or 25% behind the preformance curve?Rolphus - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Interesting review... only one question though. Why use the 32-bit version of Crysis on Vista x64? Is there an issue with the 64-bit version that I don't know about?