Verdict: Slightly less fun than the miner's strikes.
We've seen every ROG motherboard ever made, and some have walked away with Premium Grade awards despite their inflated price. The Asus Blitz Formula, for instance, justified its £162 price tag by offering features that other boards lacked: massive overclocking potential, a pre-fitted water-cooling block for the Northbridge, and improved ATI CrossFire performance courtesy of a Crosslinx chip. It might have been expensive, but it was great value, and had presence and personality.
The Striker II Formula costs even more than the Blitz Formula, but drops water cooling in favour of a large conventional heatsink. It's based around the Nvidia nForce 780i SLI chipset, so it has support for SLI and 3-Way SLI rather than CrossFire, DDR2 memory and 1,600MHz Intel CPUs such as the Core 2 Extreme QX9-series.
However, we're underwhelmed by 3-Way SLI, which can only use GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra cards and doesn't yield sufficiently impressive performance for the massive financial outlay. Furthermore, the £106 Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP can be overclocked to run with a 2,160MHz FSB, so it can accommodate a 1,600MHz Core 2 Extreme QX9-series CPU and still apply a big overclock to it. The use of DDR2 memory (Nvidia has yet to release a DDR3-compatible chipset) is also annoying - a £190 overclocking motherboard should be using the higher frequencies of DDR3 memory.
Even the looks of the Striker II didn't impress us. The heatsinks are different colours, making the board appear as if it's been cobbled together out of bits and bobs lying around the Asus factory. The VRM heatsink attached to the Northbridge also clashed with our Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro cooler, and we had to bend the lower fins of the cooler slightly to fit it.
The board's general layout is good. Asus has mounted the floppy, EIDE, 24-pin power and six S-ATA II sockets along the right-hand side of the PCB, with generous spacing between them. The three 16x PCI-E slots all have enough room to accommodate three dual-slot cards, although this arrangement means that only the black 1x PCI-E slot will be free. This slot is intended for the audio daughterboard (there's no audio codec on the motherboard) and can only accept a card that's 17mm longer than its 1x PCI-E connector, precluding the use of a third-party sound card in this slot. If you install two dual-slot cards, you'll have the use of one of the PCI slots and one of the 16x PCI-E slots, which could house any PCI-E card.
As with many motherboards that aspire to massive overclocks, the Striker II has power and reset buttons on the PCB, and a CMOS reset button on the rear I/O panel. This panel has only one PS/2 socket (for a keyboard), but sports six USB ports and FireWire (eight USB and two FireWire in total, if you use the supplied backplate). Coaxial and optical S/PDIF are also present, as are two Gigabit LAN ports. Like other recent ROG boards, there's an external POST readout screen in the box, and the bundled game has been updated from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts.
The Striker II failed to impress with its stock speed performance. Every individual test ran slower than with the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP we used for our reference PC. The poor overall score of 897 is mainly due to the rubbish multitasking score of 733.
Overclocking proved to be a frustrating experience. The review sample we used for this test was the third Striker II that Asus had sent in for testing, with the previous two boards exhibiting two different faults before dying. We were therefore pleased that our third retail-boxed Striker II managed to power up at all. However, after many failed attempts to get the board to POST with an overclocked FSB, our third review sample joined its predecessors in silicon heaven and refused to boot at all.
While it's difficult to say exactly what was wrong with this third sample, it's interesting that it worked fine until we started fiddling with the voltage and FSB options - clearly, this was not a case of the board being 'DOA', and it was hugely disappointing that we couldn't overclock it. We can't, of course, say that every Striker II will fail in a similar fashion, however.
Conclusion
Had the Striker II overclocked to incredible levels, it would still have struggled to impress. The stock speed scores are poor, the price is extremely high, and the board fails to be particularly exciting or innovative. Paying top dollar should buy you imperious performance and luxurious design; this Striker II Formula offers neither of these qualities.
The Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP is a better investment, as this is the fastest motherboard we've seen and costs significantly less.
