Review Conclusion of ASUS Striker II Extreme nForce 790i Ultra SLI mainboard review
Bluetooth 2 Apr 2008

Conclusion

ASUS RoG boards never fail to impress. With it's vast array of features and add-ons, it makes it a very complete solution for gamers or overclocker. This board supports all the latest out there including DDR3, 1600FSB QX9770 processors, 3 Way SLI. Seriously, if you aren't interested in running 3 way SLI using 3 x 8800GTX or 9800GTX, this board could be a white elephant.

Performance wise, this board wins some and lose some when compared to the boards when paired up with 2GB of DDR3-1066 modules. We observed that the performance obtained in 3Dmark isn't representative of the 'real world' benchmarks. This is especially true when we ran the game benchmarks in SLI mode.

In terms of overclocking, the BIOS comes pretty complete with large range of FSB and voltage options available. You can see the BIOS options here. In our o/c test, we used a E6550 processor that clocks at 7x333 and o/c it by lowering the multiplier to 6x and increase the cpu clk to 540MHz x 6. We used the unlink mode and set the memory to close to 1066MHz so that it won't be the bottleneck in our o/c test. Voltages are also increased to ensure more stability. Vcore is set to 1.40v, Vdimm to 1.8v, the rest remains unchanged.

In our previous tests of nForce 650i and 680i, we complained about the heat generated by the chipset. The ASUS Striker II Extreme seems to have a better cooling block that helped to cool them down during operation. Of course, if you prefer, you can always enhance the cooling with water cooling.

In conclusion, ASUS Striker II Extreme is a very complete product that would impress your friends. You also get more in the BIOS like the Auto Overclocking options. IN reality, a true overclocker might not really need those auto overclocking features. Thus, if you are looking for a LGA775 board that support the Wolfdale/Yorkfield processors and wants 3 way SLI support and good performance, this board might be in your consideration list other than it's high price tag.

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