A very extensive software collection, and the manual is pretty nice too. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (a.k.a. GRAWs) is a pretty sweet game, and having it bundled with the Striker sort of goes with that Military naming scheme ASUS is after. The Striker Software DVD is pretty hefty, so I'll just detail its contents in point form.

DRIVERS

UTILITIES

There's also the Make Disk Utilities for creating SATA and RAID driver floppy disks for use during system instalation. Furthermore, there's also an NVIDIA RAID User's Guide, an NVIDIA ForceWare Networking Administrator's Guide for advanced networking features, and an Sil3132 User' Guide for additional SATA driver and RAID configuration. A very thorough DVD.

A great bonus is the the option to build a SATA or RAID disk from booting off the DVD (avoiding the need for an OS to be installed -- a chicken and egg problem). Just leave the DVD in the drive, fire up the system, and you'll be presented with a few options for building a SATA or RAID floppy disk. Well done ASUS!

Six SATA cables and power adapters. That's enough to fill up every SATA port on this board. We also get an ATA133 cable and a floppy drive cable. A nice complement thus far.

A couple of D-Brackets to complement the already robust rear I/O panel. We get another IEEE1394 FireWire port, and two more USB2.0 ports. You can also see how ASUS color coded the pin blocks on the cable ends, so we'll know exactlly where to plug them in on the motherboard.

Every motherboard comes with a rear I/O shield. But this one is unique. Not only is it well built and very sturdy (most are really quite flimsy), but it also has this little power cord that plugs into the motherboard. Why? Cause this thing glows in the dark! The I/O shield for the Striker uses a form of electroluminescent plastic to shed a little light on the situation.

There's an auxiliary chipset fan too, and three temperature probes.

This little fan is nice -- it's pretty quiet, and does aid in cooling somewhat. In my experiences though, these auxiliary fans rarely reduce tempatures by anything more than a couple of degrees Celcius. It's also murder to remove, and when in place, prevents us from using one of Noctua NH-U 12 cpu coolers. As for the temperature probes, they are of a thermistor-type, measuring the resistence incurred in the probe during temperature change. There are three connectors on the motherboard for their attachment (see picture above). This is a very thoughtful addition on behalf of ASUS.

The temperature probes connect at one of three locations, indicated by the label OPT_TEMP. In the motherboard picture above, it's the top right two pins that accept the temperature probe.

This is nice. It's a quick connect terminal block for the front case panel buttons and lights. It's far easier to hook all those little pins up to these blocks, and then clip the block onto the motherboard front panel pin headers. Now if they could only do the same for the front panel audio pin headers, that would be nice.

A SoundMax Directional microphone. It even comes with some adhesive velcro strips to attach it to the top of an LCD (or CRT) monitor.

A great big SLI bridge. A must for any NVIDIA chipset-based motherboard, obviously.

Some tie wraps for taming wires. A cheap item, but useful never the less. Note: I had to take this picture against the Striker box because photographing white on white is quite difficult.

And finally, add a little ASUS to your life with an ASUS case badge and key chain dongle.

Well, that about rounds up a very extensive bundle. Time to move onto the BIOS.