Asus Striker Extreme

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 24th January 2007
Comments (35) Stumble
Asus Striker Extreme Board Layout & Features
Asus Striker Extreme Board Layout & Features
The Striker Extreme’s layout is one of the best I’ve seen. At a first glance, you’d think that the board was heavily overcrowded, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that Asus has carved this one in solid gold. It features 100% solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors right the way across the board, improving signal quality and capacitor life. This provides better stability at higher clock speeds, but at an extra cost over standard caps.

It’s not all good though, as there are some flaws in the layout. Probably the most annoying one for me has to be the positioning of the IDE port – it sucks, to be quite blunt. It’s directly behind the 24-pin ATX power connector, and is the wrong way around too, making cabling untidy. When you install the supplied ATA133 ribbon cable, the ribbon actually comes out of the connector on the memory slot side. Urgh.

Asus has designed the heatsink in a way that allows the board to run completely silent without the need for active cooling on the board itself. However, because of the sheer size of the heatpipe array, some large heatsinks simply won’t fit on the board. Anything with similar clearance to Zalman’s CNPS9500 / CNPS9700 series coolers will fit without issue, but some of the larger heatsinks like Noctua’s NH-U12 will not fit because of clearance issues. If your heatsink is wider than 103mm less than 35mm from its base, there will not be room.

Asus Striker Extreme Board Layout & Features
Asus Striker Extreme Board Layout & Features
Next to the BIOS chip (to the left of the southbridge), Asus has included three buttons for power, reset and clear CMOS functionality. The CMOS button needs to be activated by switching a jumper next to the BIOS chip. These light up when the board is up and running. In addition, there are a bunch of blue LEDs placed across the board – these are controllable inside the Striker’s BIOS, where it’s possible to turn them on all the time, or leave them where they’re controlled by the switch on the rear IO panel when the board is off.

Moving around the board, there are six 3-pin fan headers that, with the exception of the one by the bottom PCI-Express x16 slot, are in accessible positions. These fan headers are on top of the 4-pin fan header for the CPU fan – that’s located to the right of the memory slots in our plan view of the board. The SATA connectors are all rotated by 90 degrees – personally, I think these are great for cable management, but they could cause problems with some of the smaller cases on the market.

There are three PCI-Express x16 slots on the board – the third slot is a new addition to NVIDIA’s nForce 600-series chipset and unlike the two ‘primary’ PCI-Express x16 slots, it only runs with an x8 electrical interface. NVIDIA expects enthusiasts to install a third video card for physics acceleration in the future, but it will also allow users to install another PCI-Express x16-compatible expansion card like a dedicated RAID controller.

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