Hardware Reviews / Motherboards / Asus Striker II Extreme Review (Introduction)

Giovanni van Bronckhorst saves his team from a sure goal, he puts in a cross, Dirk Kuyt heads the ball towards his teammate Wesley Sneijder, and he scores! Wesley Sneijder scored!
Ooops, wrong script, sorry guys.

Since nVIDIA is looking forward to launching the new GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards in a few days ( on 17th June ) and since those cards will be 2-way and 3-way SLI capable of course, I thought I should show you the Asus Striker II Extreme motherboard.
Striker ? Deja Vu ?
Kind of.
Asus decided to use the name Striker for any nVIDIA nFORCE based motherboard from now on, and since this is the second Striker it goes by the number 2 in latin ( II ), and since Asus decided to separate their DDR2 boards and DDR3 boards by the names ("Formula" and "Extreme" respectively ), this one gets the name Asus Striker II Extreme.
Wait a second, isn't there a Striker II already ? Yes, the Striker II Formula, which is based on the nVIDIA nFORCE 780i chipset with DDR2 support.
The nF780i was nothing new to be honest, and not worthy. It was the same chipset ( nF680i ), just a new revision ( some minor changes/fixes ) and a external chip to add PCI-Express 2.0 support.
On the other side, the Striker II Extreme is based on the nF790i Ultra SLI, which is a brand new chipset ( thank God... no don't say that before you "get to know" the new chip! ) that introduces DDR3 support for a nVIDIA chipset for the first time.
The first Striker Extreme was a PITA to be honest.
We faced multiple issues during the testing process, during our benchmarking sessions ( with both "normal" cooling and extreme cooling ), and also had multiple RMAs due to several dead boards ( most of them died with no reason ).The nFORCE 680i was a "semi-decent" chipset... it was very good in terms of memory overclocking, a bit above average in terms of FSB overclocking for the Core 2 Duo processors back then, and a bit tricky sometimes ( sometimes it would work fine with some settings, and sometimes it wouldn't work properly with the same settings exactly! ).
Of course, if you wanted to run two GeForce 8 series cards in SLI, you had to buy one.
If you ask me to describe my experience with the nFORCE 680i based motherboards, there's just one word that matches my feelings precisely: Painful.
I'll just quote a british friend of mine "Sell that bloody board mate", and yes... I did gave up on it and sold it ( after a full year )...

Unfortunately apart from being a hardware reviewer & tester, I'm also a gamer ( a demanding one actually ) and a benchmarker ( benchmarker is someone who overclocks and tweaks his PC & OS to reach the highest possible scores on various benchmarks, using various cooling equipment, etc ), and to stay "in touch" with the competition you need to run multiple graphics cards as well, a single card won't cut it.
So... it's my time again to..."dance with the devil". Sorry I meant try the new nVIDIA nFORCE 790i Ultra SLI chipset, and the non-reference design motherboard from Asus, called the Striker II Extreme.
I've got some lexotanyl next to me ( just in case ), and here we go...

Let's start unpacking this thing ( and somebody grab me a glass of water... )