Overclocking & Stability

Stability is absolutely fine – we ran the board at its stock settings for 24 hours with the combination of a quad-core CPU and Prime95 on all cores, as well as 3DMark06 running on a pair of 8800 GTs in SLI. The board had minimum extra cooling, and while the heatpipes got extremely hot, the board didn't crash once.

While overclocking with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 ‘Yorkfield’ chip, we found it achieved pretty much what the nForce 680i/780i SLI is capable of – high 400s in the front side bus stakes. There's plenty of voltage to play with, but any increase in voltage absolutely requires additional cooling of the heatpipes – we ended up with a separate 80mm fan sitting on the south bridge and nF200 bridge chip and another 120mm cooling the north bridge.

We achieved 481MHz FSB (1925MHz "QDR"), stable with the CPU at 1.475V and it would boot at 487MHz (1950MHz) but decided it was quite sure whether it wanted to behave. As it stands, with the current BIOS the board can be a little temperamental with new memory and new clock settings, requiring a few seconds holding down the reset button to set it right again. The original Striker Extreme seemed a little happier in this regard and more recent CPUs should go further, so the two are probably comparable when it comes to overclocking capability.

Power Consumption

Value and Conclusions

The Asus Striker II Formula can bought right now for around £175 – that's only £10 more than the original Striker Extreme, although both seem to vary considerably so shop around for the best price. Even though the Striker Extreme has dropped in price almost £60 since it was introduced, the Striker II Formula is excellent value for such a small difference in this respect. However, this was mostly due to chipset pricing when Nvidia launched the original nForce 680i SLI. On its own it was exceptionally expensive, but this was changed later in its life so the board now costs far less to manufacture.

Despite the updated feature set, the Striker II Formula finally has a comparable power use to the ‘designed by Nvidia’ board – this was something that the Striker Extreme definitely didn’t manage. While it shows that Asus has really gone to town on kitting the Striker II Formula with power efficient features, its general feature set is very much the same to the XFX nForce 780i SLI bar a few LEDs and extra power phases dotted about. The power phases at least are very useful considering the overclocking-enthusiast market this board is targeted at, however there are other "features" that are quite simply useless: 1) the onboard temperature probe pin-outs – great, but no probes are provided. 2) The insistence of onboard LEDs for CPU, north bridge and south bridge "levels" is pointless – I am not going to look around the board for them and one set is even hidden under a heatsink! 3) The BIOS needs optimising to cut out the confusing repetition.

It's all there, but these extras are features for the sake of it and don't make for a tight build – it's just a bunch of marketing tricks that are a waste to the consumer.

The Striker II Formula is nearly £20 more than the XFX nForce 780i SLI board, but considering the support you'll get from Asus (we're already on BIOS 09!), the better look, better package and better cooling, as well as the extra year warranty, the Asus Striker II Formula is genuinely very good value.

The major downside is that the performance difference between the two Strikers and even the ‘designed by Nvidia’ nForce 780i SLI and 680i SLI is entirely negligible – even despite making "the [nForce 780i SLI] shine" by running it with 1T memory timings.

The Striker II Formula is tweaked for quad-cores and offers good overclocking, but it's not worth the upgrade if you already own an nForce 680i SLI unless you're buying a 45nm Penryn to go along with it. Just like our original conclusion with the nForce 780i SLI, it won't improve your SLI or general computing performance so is absolutely not worth the upgrade in this respect.

In addition, considering Nvidia has hinted at further chipset releases this year around its Hybrid SLI technology, it might be worth waiting to see what Nvidia launches in "Q2", however, that's still a good four-five months away at most. £175 is a significant investment to find out there's something better just around the corner. Since the only real reason to upgrade is 45nm Intel CPUs which will take the next few months (or even weeks!) to flourish on shop shelves, so it might be worth sitting on this one for a little bit and keeping an ear to the ground to make a more educated purchasing decision.

Final Thoughts

Despite the fact it offers absolutely no extra performance and a few iffy bits, we really like this board and it offers good value for the genuine features it delivers. If you really want the latest SLI solution, the Striker II Formula should certainly be on your shopping list – just be wary of what's coming out in the next few months: you won't be waiting another year for a chipset update like before.

That said, with Nehalem CPUs just over a year away, the Asus Striker II Formula might also be the perfect complement to get an annual upgrade cycle under way.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?