Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/asus_formula_striker_2/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
Three PCIe 16x slots for SLI enthusiasts!
Asus designed the Striker II Formula to be part of its "Republic of Gamers" line of motherboards - desgined for gamers who want to overclock and run SLI graphics configurations.
The board is choke full of features:
To make overclocking simple, Asus added a "Level Up" feature to the BIOS. With this feature, novice overclockers can pick the model of processor whose level of performance is desired, and then the BIOS will automatically try to overclock the processor to an equivalent performance level. Advanced users can use the manual "Extreme Tweaker" settings to squeeze the last bit of potential out of their memory and processor.
Ok, I admit that the board sounds great - but how will it perform in our lab?
| Full Specifications |
|
CPU
|
LGA775 socket for Intel® Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo / Pentium® Extreme / Pentium® D / Pentium® 4 / Celeron® D Processors |
|
Chipset
|
NVIDIA nForce® 680i SLI™
- Support SLI-Ready Memory Technlogy |
|
Front Side Bus
|
1333** / 1066 / 800 / 533 MHz
** available when CPU's supporting 1333MHz FSB |
|
Memory
|
Dual channel memory architecture
4 x DIMM, max. 8GB, DDR2-800/667/533, non-ECC and un-buffered memory |
|
SLI-Ready Memory
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1200MHz
|
|
Expansion Slots
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2 x PCI Express x16 slot, support NVIDIA® SLI™ technology, at full x16, x16 speed(blue)
1 x PCI Express x16, at x8 speed(middle) 1 x PCI Express x1 2 x PCI 2.2 |
|
Scalable Link Interface (SLI™)
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Support two identical NVIDIA SLI-Ready graphics cards (both at x16 mode)
ASUS PEG Link |
|
Storage
|
South bridge supports:
- 1 x Ultra DMA 133 / 100 / 66 / 33 - 6 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s - NVIDIA MediaShield™ RAID supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD span cross Serial ATA drives |
|
LAN
|
NVIDIA nForce® 680i SLI™ built-in dual Gigabit MAC with external Marvell PHY
Support NVIDIA DualNet® technology |
|
High Definition Audio
|
SupremeFX Audio Card
- ADI 1988B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC |
|
IEEE 1394a
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VIA6308P controller supports 2 x 1394a ports
|
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USB
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max. 10 USB2.0/1.1 ports(6 ports at mid-board, 4 ports at back panel)
|
|
Overclocking Features
|
Extreme Tweaker
Intelligent overclocking tools: - AI NOS™ (Non-delay Overclocking System) - AI Overclocking (intelligent CPU frequency tuner) - ASUS AI Booster Utility - O.C Profile Overclocking Protection: - ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall) |
|
Special Features
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LCD Poster
Onboard Switches: Power / Reset / Clr CMOS Q-Connector ASUS EZ Flash2 ASUS Music Alarm ASUS MyLogo3 |
|
Back Panel I/O Ports
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1 x LCD Poster
1 x PS/2 Keyboard port(purple) 1 x PS/2 Mouse port(green) 1 x Optical + 1 x Coaxial S/PDIF Output 2 x LAN (RJ45) port 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 1 x IEEE1394a port |
|
Internal I/O Connectors
|
3 x USB 2.0 connectors supports additional 6 USB 2.0 ports
1 x Floppy disk drive connector 1 x IDE connector for two devices 6 x SATA connectors 8 x Fan connector: 1 x CPU / 1 x SPS / 3 x Chassis / 3 x Optional 3 x thermal sensor connector 1 x IEEE1394a connector 1 x S/PDIF output connector 1 x Chassis Intrusion connector 24-pin ATX Power connector 8-pin ATX 12V Power connector System panel connector |
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BIOS
|
8Mb Award BIOS, PnP, DMI2.0, WfM2.0, SM BIOS 2.3, Multi-Language BIOS
|
|
Manageability
|
WOL by PME, WOR by PME, Chasis Intrusion, PXE
|
|
Accessories
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SLI bridge
ASUS Optional Fan 3 in 1 ASUS Q-Connector Kit UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable Floppy disk drive cable SATA cables SATA power cables 2-port USB2.0 module IEEE1394a module I/O Shield Cable Ties User's manual |
|
Software
|
The hottest 3D Game: Ghost Recon
Striker Extreme Support DVD: Drivers ASUS PC Probe II ASUS Update ASUS AI Booster Futuremark ® 3DMark® 06 Advanced Edition NVIDIA MediaShield™ RAID Kaspersky® Anti-Virus |
|
Form Factor
|
ATX Form Factor, 12"x 9.6" (30.5cm x 24.5cm)
|
The Board
Looking at the board I find a number of things I like - and some I don't.
What I like:
What I don't like:
Overall, the board looks very well made.
We get the more than usual pile of cables - four SATA-II data cables, Molex to SATA power cable adapter, SLI bridges, easy plug motherboard connectors, an I/O slot cover with FireWire and dual USB headers, two fans for chipset cooling, IDE cable, a POST LCD, and a back I/O plate cover.
Rounding up the included goodies is a Quick Start Guide, User Guide, driver/utility CD and a copy of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. Not a bad bundle at all.
The heatsinks and heatpipes look good, but I have to wonder if there is enough fin area for passive cooling. We have to remember that the 780i chipset is basically a new revision of the 680i chipset with the addition of an NForce 200 controller for dual PCIe 2.0 16x slots - and that the 680i was notorious for running hot.
In fact the heatsinks were too hot to keep my fingers on them for extended periods once I was testing the system.
Plenty of solid state capacitors here... the processor should get nice clean power - I expect good overclocks.
Asus color codes the DIMM slots correctly -- I hate it when dual channels are not indicated by DIMM color.
The SATA II connectors are the right angle variety, which does tend to keep the cables organized more cleanly in a case, but is also a bit of a pain when testing on a bench top!
The three PCIe 16x slots dominate the I/O slots, and if you use double wide coolers you lose access to the single PCIe 1x and two PCI connectors.
The back I/O panel has six USB 2.0, two Gigabit Ethernet, one FireWire, a PS/2 keyboard, SP/DIFF and Optical output as well as a handy CMOS erase switch.
The BIOS
Asus wants to make sure that people remember that this board is part of their Republic of Gamers series, and the system boots with the ROG logo.
The rest of the BIOS is pretty standard, with the exception of the Extreme Tweaker menu.
Ok, now we get to the fun stuff - the Extreme Tweaker menu's.
If you are a novice overclocker, you will like the "CPU Level Up" menu - it will let you painlessly overclock your processor some - however if you fancy yourself an experienced overclocker, you will want to ignore the level up menu, and tweak the settings manually.
As you can see, the System Clocks, FSB & Memory Config, Overclocking and Over Voltage menu's contain most of the "meat" of the overclocking controls - but note the additional LED controls at the bottom that can be used to indicate overtemp or overvoltage conditions.
I found the memory multiplier selection to be a bit weak, I wish there were some more multipliers available; fortunately the unlinked mode works better than I expected - so if you can't get a memory speed you want with the normal divisors, go ahead and unlink memory speeds and just run your memory at your highest speed / lowest latency combination. It works.
I liked the voltage tweakebility, but I wish that Auto showed you what the Auto voltage was.
The rest of the BIOS screens were pretty ordinary, here they are for your viewing pleasure:
More BIOS
Here s the rest of the BIOS shots...
Test Setup
We made the test systems as similar as we could, other than the memory - so it should give us some very interesting results! Hardware used for testing the motherboards:
Benchmarks Used Here is a listing of all the tests we performed: NVIDIA's ForceWare 169.12 video drivers were used.
Business Winstone
The Asus Striker II Formula does well, but not spectacular, in the Business Winstone bench, both at stock and overclocked settings.
Content Creation
The Asus Striker II Formula is a bit slower than most of the competition for Content Creation Winstone.
WinRAR
As we are transitioning from using single threaded WinRAR results to only using multi-threaded WinRAR results, only the top two boards on this chart are comparable - and the MSI P35 Platinum Combo using DDR3 handily beat the Asus Striker II Formula for WinRAR.
HDTach
The Asus Formula Maximus II did well for HDTach, but it did not take the top spot.
LAME MP3
The Asus Striker II Formula did well at Lame, especially when overclocked where it came in second place.
TMPGEnc
Unfortunately Asus Striker II Formula was less than stellar with TMPGEnc.
XViD
Once again, the Asus Striker II Formula does not do too well.
Call of Duty
The Asus Striker II Formula did poorly at Call of Duty.
Commanche 4
The Asus Striker II Formula gave average results for Commanche.
Doom 3
The Asus Striker II Formula did not do well at Doom 3.
Quake 4
Performance in Quake 4 was not far above average either.
Halo
The Asus Striker II Formula turned in fairly average results for Halo.
Jedi Knight
The Asus Striker II Formula did well at Jedi Knight, both at stock and overclocked.
UT4K
It also did well at Unreal Tournament 2004.
Sandra CPU
The Asus Striker II Formula did OK at the Sandra CPU test.
Sandra Bandwidth
The Asus Striker II Formula did quite well at the Sandra Memory Bandwidth test.
Sandra Latency
And quite well for the latency test.
RightMark Read
The Asus Striker II Formula did very well at the Read benchmark at stock, and even better when overclocked where it was only beaten by DDR3-1800.
RightMark Write
The Asus Striker II Formula also did very well at the Write benchmark at both stock and overclocked speeds.
RightMark Latency
The Asus Striker II Formula did so well here when overclocked that frankly I think it exposes a flaw in the RightMark Latency benchmark; however it also did well at stock.
RightMark Bandwidth
The Asus Striker II Formula did not do as well for RightMark bandwidth. However, I could never figure out if RightMark Bandwidth is truly representative, as I've often seen memory get great Rightmark Read, Write and Latency results, and then end up with a less than stellar Bandwidth result. Go figure.
Overclocking
Overclocking the Asus Striker II Formula was not difficult - until I tried to exceed 490MHz. No matter what I tried, I could not get the board to go higher than 490MHz FSB, and I know that the processor I was testing with is capable of running at 7x507MHz.
Mind you, while the Striker II would not reliably exceed 490MHz, it was rock solid at 490MHz - and as the benchmarks show, the best performance was obtained at 8x450MHz (3.60GHz processor speed) as it was faster than 7x490 for the vast majority of benchmarks.
In order to run stably at 8x450MHz, I used the following hardware and settings:
Power Consumption
Generally, a gamer's box is not exactly a "green" box - and a dedicated gamer going for quad core processors, high speed memory, and multiple GPU's will not really care how much power his rig sucks up, as long as he gets the performance he wants.
Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to measure the power utilization of the system (not including monitor) while running heavy power crunching (multi-threaded POV-Ray) and idling on the desktop. As you can see even without the GPU being busy the system can draw 220W, so if you intend in getting two or three GPU's, you would be well advised in investing in a 700W - 1KW power supply.
Conclusion
There are a lot of things to like about the Striker II Formula:
There are also some annoyances:
The Asus Striker II Formula is definitely aimed at gamers - the three GPU slots and limited expandability when they are occupied make it unsuitable for business use - and it does have excellent potential for gamers who want to have multiple NVIDIA GPU's.
The overclocking potential of the board is very good - achieving a stable 490MHz FSB with an E6400 is a very good result; and it is likely that 45nm dual core chips could even go higher (FSB wise) on the board. Overall, I liked the board layout, and while I was a little surprised at the average gaming performance with the single 7800GT I used on the board, we have to remember that this board is aimed at gamers who will have two - and sometimes three - GPU's, which would immediately significantly improve its gaming potential.
Basically, if you are a gamer and want an SLI rig, you can't go wrong with this board, if you are willing to pay the price. On the other hand, if you are trying to build an office or general purpose rig that will only have one video card... well, you might be better off with going without something a bit more conventional.
For another point of view, check out OverclockersClub's review of the Striker II Formula!
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