[H] Asus Striker Review

In the first example, Everest reports a 400 MHz FSB and 533 MHz RAM. In the second, it reports a 266 MHz FSB and 533 MHz RAM.

I understand the double and quad data rates. The confusion was solely based on the reference clock.

My Everest comment was based on the quote above. In both cases you state 533 ram. I see now that I didn't read your 1066 bus reference properly.
 
Don't mean to bring up an old thread. But Im looking to upgrade this summer and am either interested in the Striker Extreme or the Evga 680i. When I read the reviews for both, the EVGA outperformed the Asus by a long shot, but everyone was saying that a BIOS upgrade would resolve most of the Strikers issues. So the question is...has it? I saw a crapload of new BIOSs for the Striker Extreme on Asus' site and was wondering, was it worth getting over the EVGA or is the EVGA board still top pick?
 
My recommendation is going to still be for the eVGA 680i. Better performance, better overclocking and cheaper.
 
Only buy an Nvidia 680i chipset based mobo if you tend to do heavy independant of FSB overclocks on the ram and/or need SLI... otherwise get a good Intel platfom...
 
Only buy an Nvidia 680i chipset based mobo if you tend to do heavy independant of FSB overclocks on the ram and/or need SLI... otherwise get a good Intel platfom...

I do. So people still recommend the EVGA 680i board? Toms Hardware enthusiast system builder sections recommends the Asus Striker. But then again, its toms hardware so......still the evga?
 
I do. So people still recommend the EVGA 680i board? Toms Hardware enthusiast system builder sections recommends the Asus Striker. But then again, its toms hardware so......still the evga?

I wonder why that is? When you break down the facts comparing the two I can't see any reason why anyone would choose the Striker Extreme over the eVGA board. (I own both, and I would never buy a Striker. I only have mine because Kyle gave mine to me.)

Fact 1: The Striker Extreme is more expensive than the eVGA 680i.
Fact 2: The eVGA 680i is a better overclocker.
Fact 3: The Striker Extreme has more features than the eVGA board.
Fact 4: ASUS Customer service blows.
Fact 5: eVGA Customer service seems pretty good from my limited exeperience with them.
Fact 6: The P5N32E-SLI is a better choice from a price standpoint compared to the eVGA 680i board. (All it lacks are the eSATA connections, the LCD poster, and LEDs)
Fact 7: Updating the BIOS of the Striker Extreme could turn your expensive board into a brick and the bastards at ASUS will charge you for a new BIOS chip even though you only flashed the BIOS to fix issues that should have been fixed prior to the board's release.
Fact 8: The eVGA 680i SLI has one more PCIe x1 slot than the Striker does.
Fact 9: The eVGA 680i's sound problems were fixed much earlier. As I understand it there are still several individuals that have sound issues on the Striker even after ASUS supposedly fixed the issues.
Fact 10: The Striker Extreme is ridiculously picky about what memory you can use with it. There are constant reports of the boards not posting with 4GB of ram installed.

In my opinion both ASUS and eVGA jumped the gun when they released the bulk of their 680i boards. eVGA has really stepped up to the plate and has resolved all their issues that I know of. They will even RMA the older versions of the boards for users with quad core overclocking problems. ASUS will not. What does that tell you? ASUS took over twice as long to fix the sound issues and I know from personal experience how they jack their customers around after their own BIOS updates bricked their expensive 680i SLI boards.

When it comes to the 680i SLI, the Striker Extreme would be my last choice. I'd take the eVGA, Gigabyte and any reference design board over the Striker. The Striker is a nice board and despite how I've bashed it they have their strong points. I stand by my original statement that the Striker Extreme isn't worth the price.
 
Don't mean to bring up an old thread. But Im looking to upgrade this summer and am either interested in the Striker Extreme or the Evga 680i. When I read the reviews for both, the EVGA outperformed the Asus by a long shot, but everyone was saying that a BIOS upgrade would resolve most of the Strikers issues. So the question is...has it? I saw a crapload of new BIOSs for the Striker Extreme on Asus' site and was wondering, was it worth getting over the EVGA or is the EVGA board still top pick?

I built a couple evga 680i systems for friends, it's a solid product and most of the issues are gone.

When it came time to build my 680i system recently I went with the striker against better judgement. It had more features, seemed to be a more robutst product, and a lot of the issues had been worked out of the BIOS by then (hah!). I chalked up a lot of the negativity around the board to the fact that people who don't know what they are doing tend to bitch a lot more about products that are just beyond their abilities, and people like to trash expensive products that they can't afford out of e-jealousy. Given that I've been building my own computers for a long time, work in IT, and obviously money isn't that big of an issue if your plunking for 8800 SLI I rolled the dice on the board.

It was a big mistake.

While a lot of the issues have been worked out some of the most glaring ones still exist. The board is also extremely finicky to the point of driving you nuts. The amount of time I had to spend swapping memory in and out to get the damn thing to even boot was absurd. While all the 680i boards I've worked with have been picky about RAM the striker takes the cake, the same can be said for the voltage needed to get it to work properly. And even once it is working there is the chance when you turn it off it won't turn back on and you have to do a voodoo dance around your PC with a shrunken monkey head and a stick of el-cheap 1.8v RAM screaming BOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTT at the top of your lungs to make it turn back on.

There are other more glaring issues but from browsing sites and personal experience that seems to be the main issue, and it's luck of the draw as well. On my second striker build using the exact same part pics (ram, GPU, PSU, and CPU that is) everything worked fine... same BIOS as well.

This is made worse by the fact that ASUS customer service blows. The guys at corsair were far more helpfull to me even though the problem was not their fault. Even offering to swap out the memory for me with no questions asked.

My next gripe is a strictly personal one, but I think it's valid. The fancy cooling system on the striker isn't all that well thought out. Most high end coolers are towers, and the cooper cooling on the board works best when the CPU cooler blasts air down, not off to the side. I'm using a silverstone nitrogon 06 which fixes that issue, but it's rather silly to design a high end boards cooling in a way that is counter intuative to most of the high end cooling out there.

There is a lot to be said for some of it's options, but honestly a lot of people won't use them so it's just money wasted.

All that said now that I've had it working for a while it's a great board, and it looks great in my case (probably the best argument for it over the evga is asthetics, which doesn't really count IMHO), but wasn't worth the money.
 
Thank you Dan for your input on the Asus. Ive loved Asus in the past but it seems this time, they really blew it. Is this true for the 680i boards:

Asus Striker: Problems all around as mentioned above
eVGA: Good :)
Gigabyte: decent, lot of features (SATA), not that great OCing but very expensive
DFI: picky about everything..holding to DFI's reputation (this is just a guess)
Abit: self explanatory

Im looking at a good OCing board for less than $300 with a decent amount of SATA ports (I wanna put at least 3TB in my comp ..i can do that with 6 SATA ports). So it seems the evga it is. I don't want to shell out $350 for the Gigabyte especially knowing their reputation. I've known gigabyte products to not be the best on the market. Abit, IMO, went downhill after the PII day. I'm not really sure about now but I still got a feeling they are :(. I was going to go with the Striker since I found it refurbished on NE for cheap, but I guess ill take the $250 and put it towards the eVGA. :) Who knew that a graphics card manufacturer would make a really kickass board
 
Thank you Dan for your input on the Asus. Ive loved Asus in the past but it seems this time, they really blew it. Is this true for the 680i boards:

Asus Striker: Problems all around as mentioned above
eVGA: Good :)
Gigabyte: decent, lot of features (SATA), not that great OCing but very expensive
DFI: picky about everything..holding to DFI's reputation (this is just a guess)
Abit: self explanatory

Im looking at a good OCing board for less than $300 with a decent amount of SATA ports (I wanna put at least 3TB in my comp ..i can do that with 6 SATA ports). So it seems the evga it is. I don't want to shell out $350 for the Gigabyte especially knowing their reputation. I've known gigabyte products to not be the best on the market. Abit, IMO, went downhill after the PII day. I'm not really sure about now but I still got a feeling they are :(. I was going to go with the Striker since I found it refurbished on NE for cheap, but I guess ill take the $250 and put it towards the eVGA. :) Who knew that a graphics card manufacturer would make a really kickass board

This is my take on the 680i SLI boards I've used:

eVGA 680i SLI -Dependable, badass overclocking, and decent feature set and layout.
ASUS P5N32-E SLI -The litte brother of the Striker Extreme. Less features, but just as many problems.
ASUS Striker Extreme -The best feature set with a painful list of problems and a price that is nothing short of ridiculous.
Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 -Interesting feature set, BS cooling, and stable.

I haven't worked with any of the others yet. My order of preference is this:

eVGA 680i SLI > Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 > ASUS P5N32-E SLI > ASUS Striker Extreme

As far as making the board, eVGA does nothing of the kind. NVIDIA designed the board, another company manufactured it and eVGA stuck their name on it. There are BFG and ECS boards that are the exact same design and therefore should perform just as well. Though I wouldn't be surprised if ECS neutered their BIOS as they did with the PX1 Extreme.

The Gigabyte board has more SATA ports than any of the others do. The Striker Extreme does have two eSATA ports which is nice though. In any case if you are really serious about storage I suggest not using the onboard storage controller at all and using an add in board with some kind of XOR processing engine. It's expensive, and not everyone will agree with me, but I think it makes a huge difference in performance. It will definitely make a difference in a RAID 5 or other redundant configuration.
 
ASUS Striker Extreme -The best feature set with a painful list of problems and a price that is nothing short of ridiculous.

While I agree with most of what you said I'm going to take issue with this.

At current prices on newegg the gigabyte is 349.99, abit 329.99 asus striker 329.99

It's not even the most expensive anymore, granted it's price dropped over 100 bucks once abit released their 680i (which I hear is actually pretty good any chance you will review it?), but it's not as absurd as it once was.

However I still do not feel it was worth the 330 I paid for it.
 
While I agree with most of what you said I'm going to take issue with this.

At current prices on newegg the gigabyte is 349.99, abit 329.99 asus striker 329.99

It's not even the most expensive anymore, granted it's price dropped over 100 bucks once abit released their 680i (which I hear is actually pretty good any chance you will review it?), but it's not as absurd as it once was.

However I still do not feel it was worth the 330 I paid for it.

I wasn't aware of what the Gigabyte's price was currently. I knew that the Striker had come down quite a bit and I know what the eVGA 680i SLI boards are going for. My recommendation and list of favorites from best to worst still stand. Not so much for price but in the order I would use them in my own box.

As far as the reviews go, I never know what Kyle will have me review until I come and pickup the board from him. He chooses what we review and when.
 
Hi all,

I have a ASUS Striker Extreme MOBO and I can't seem to get Vista Ultimate 64bit to install on it. :( I only get so far then it says error code 0x0000035c or something can't install do not have a 64 bit processor. I am wondering if there are any settings that might prevent Vista 64 from installing?
I current have a Striker Extreme with a E6600, XFX 8800GTX, 4 Gigs OCZ ddr2 memory, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2, and ATI 650 TV card in the system.
I have tried removing the memory and using a 1 gig chip but that didn't work. I am raided on my hard drives but was going to install to a non raid 1 drive to get it installed anyway. I also tried unplugging all raid drives but that didn't work. :(
Any suggestions would be great!
Thanks!
Dave
 
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