For some time now Asus has tried to widen their market space targeting almost all possible markets with cheaper motherboards from AsRock to hitting the middle, high-end, and elite market space. The top of the line motherboards were released for the AM2 market as Crosshair and for the Socket 775 as the Striker motherboard under their Republic of Gamers label and the Asus gaming series. As you might know Nvidia recently released their follow up to the 680i chipset with the 780i and with it motherboard manufacturers have put out new versions of their motherboards including Asus with the new Striker II ultra-high end enthusiast motherboard. Today we look at the Asus Striker II Formula motherboard and give you a review of Asus newest high-end product.

As we mentioned in the intro the Striker II is based off of the new Nvidia 780i chipset. What is new overall about the 780i? Well unfortunately not that much. You might have read a 780i motherboard review right now and the chipset hasn't undergone too many changes. PCI-E 2.0 is now supported although at the moment that doesn't seem to show better performance although it is something Nvidia needed to move towards, their ESA or Enthusiast System Architecture is supported though that will also is going to come to 680i motherboards, triple SLI support which might be interesting for gamers, and probably the most significant impact is that new 45nm Penryn processors from Intel which appear to be incompatible with the 680i chipset.

Since Nvidia haven't changed their Northbridge chipset or their Southbridge chipset their solution to bringing PCI Express 2.0 support involves a new chipset added onto the board, the nForce 200. This is linked with the Northbridge to allow 32 lanes for PCI-E 2.0 which can be split between the two 16x PCI-Express slots and giving 1GB/s of bandwidth. It should be noted however that the third PCI Express slot is not 2.0 compliant but again we have yet to see any real benefit from PCI-E 2.0.

All of this adds up to some but not a lot of major changes with the 780i with probably the major difference being 680i users are in the dark when it comes to Intel's Penryn which is too bad because it does offer much better overclocking, cheaper pricing, and lower power consumption in addition to some performance improvements. This however does warrant more so a purchase of a 780i motherboard.

Luckily Asus though have made some large improvements over the Striker. First of all the huge copper design has actually shortened a bit at least in height coming down about an inch which should clear up any problems with very large heatsinks for processors. Instead more copper seems spread out over the entire motherboard with the nForce 200 also seeing a copper plate over it next to the Southbridge. Much like the 680i though things get very, very hot and overclocking the motherboard compounds this. At 1.92GHz FSB we hit 77 degrees Celsius and an untouchable heat. Asus have done a good job with their cooling and the blame lies on Nvidia for the excessive heat. It would have been nice to see a die shrink of the chipsets down to 65nm from 90nm which would have helped control the heat and power consumption level of the chipsets. Republic of Gamers logo also fit over the copper heatsink with a light underneath it to highlight it on the main middle heatsink which now takes up all the area between the CPU, video card, and RAM slots.

The Striker II also features a number of LEDs onboard the motherboard which warn the user of possibly dangerous voltage settings. There are four LEDs on the motherboard which are color coded going from green/yellow/red that see what identify what the voltage status is from normal, warning, to dangerous levels on the physical motherboard which Asus calls the Voltiminder.

One of the reasons the Striker II is such a good overclocker is due to the 8 phase power design and what Asus call El Capless. They've removed a number of the cylinder capacitors on the motherboard and instead replaced them with chipstyle polymer aluminum electrolyte capacitors which are normally used in server systems for better spacing and overall thermal dynamics.

Another feature is Asus EPU technology which digitally monitors and tunes CPU power supply as need requires which Asus claims in combination with AI gear can save 58.6% of power usage in some settings.

The audio is another add-in PCI-Express card this time called the SupremeFX II with eight channel support.