First Look: Asus Striker Extreme

Test Setup:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (operating at 2.93GHz - 11x266); 2x 1GB Corsair XMS2-6400C3 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel); 2x BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video cards (operating at 670/1640MHz); Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX & Sapphire Radeon X1900 CrossFire (for CrossFire on 975X); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 91.47 WHQL, Catalyst 6.7 WHQL.

Motherboards:

• Asus Striker Extreme (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI) - memory at 3-3-3-9-1T;
  
• Abit AW9D-MAX (Intel 975X) - memory at 3-3-3-9;
  
• Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (Intel P965) - memory at 3-3-3-9.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

The Asus Striker Extreme performs well in single card mode, but there is some work that Asus' BIOS engineers need to do in order to alleviate some of the SLI overhead that is apparent in this application.

File Compression & Encryption:

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

The Striker is slightly slower than Abit's AW9D-MAX in both compression tests, but it performs in line with Gigabyte's awesome GA-965P-DQ6 over the course of the two tests.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multi-threaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Asus' Striker falls behind the other two boards tested by a small margin - something that you're not going to notice in the real world.