This isn’t necessarily a black mark against the board as there’s only so much room on an ATX motherboard. It should be clear that you will have very little scope for using expansion cards if you use the Striker II with two graphics cards and if you go all out with three cards then you’ll have none at all. This arrangement we particularly like because it frees up space on the I/O panel and keeps the sensitive (to interference) analogue audio parts clear of the board. Integrated audio is handled by a PCI Express riser card which carries an ADI SoundMAX chip and six analogue mini jacks, with coaxial and optical connectors on the I/O panel. The only possible gripe is an absence of eSATA ports, which is something we’ve come to see as standard nowadays. Across the foot of the board there are USB and Firewire headers and there’s a single bracket in the package with two USB ports and one Firewire to add to the six USB and one Firewire on the I/O panel. Also, the power connectors and floppy connector are positioned just how we like them – at the edges of the board. There are six RAID enabled, horizontally oriented, SATA II connectors on the front edge, and a similarly “laid down” ATA133 connector sits along side. The layout of the Striker II is immaculate and packs in all of the features that you’d expect to find. This is a great step forward and also frees up some space on the I/O panel which is used – yes – for part of the chipset cooling system. Striker II Formula takes this a step further with the LCD Poster which is an external device that looks rather like a small LCD clock. The original Striker had an LCD debug display on the I/O panel which was very handy but also a touch inaccessible as the only way you could read it was by crawling behind your PC on hands and knees. The coolers are low profile and don’t get in the way of the graphics cards or the CPU socket. It doesn’t so much cover the various chips but instead joins them together in an amorphous mass that sprawls across a large part of the motherboard. This is clearly an area that Asus has worked on with the Striker II Formula as it has changed the design of the cooling system from the original Striker and it now resembles the Intel X38 Maximus Formula that we referred to in our Maximus Extreme review. A wise man would ensure that his case cooling was up to snuff to avoid problems with the motherboard overheating. It so happens that the 780i SLI MCP is a rebadged nForce 570 SLI chip and the 780i SLI SPP shows every sign that it is a 680i SLI that has been modified to link to the new nForce 200 chip.Ħ80i SLI motherboards were notorious for getting very hot and the original Striker carried a hefty passive cooling system that linked the two parts of the chipset with coolers on the power regulation hardware. Then there’s an Nvidia nForce 200 chip which does the heavy lifting for the three graphics slots and bringing up the rear is the 780i SLI MCP (Media Communications Processor) which adds a x8 PCIe slot and up to four x1 slots. There’s the 780i SLI SPP (System Platform Processor) which connects the memory and processor and doesn’t have a great deal to do with PCI Express. How, you may wonder, is this possible? It’s a good question and one that is answered by Nvidia’s block diagram which shows that it is probably more accurate to call the 780i SLI a chip collection rather than a chipset as it consists of three pieces of silicon, instead of the usual two. That’s 48 lanes right there but in total the 780i SLI can supply up to 62 lanes of PCIe so the motherboard manufacturer has the option of adding more expansion slots if they should so choose. All of which begs the question, what does 780i SLI bring to the party? The answer is in two parts there’s support for Intel’s new 45nm Penryn processors as well as lots of extra bandwidth for the graphics.Ħ80i SLI uses PCIe 1.1 across the board but 780i SLI uses a mix of PCIe 1.1 and 2.0 so the two main graphics slots each get 16 lanes of PCIe 2.0 which has double the bandwidth of PCIe 1.1 and the third graphics slot has 16 lanes of PCIe 1.1. Recently though, nVidia unveiled 3-way SLI support for both the 680i and 780i SLI chipsets, which meant these old three-slot motherboards now had some use. Instead, though, some cunning motherboard manufacturers added a third graphics slot to take up the remaining eight lanes, although there was never an obvious application for this feature. However, in total 680i SLI actually supplied 46 lanes of PCIe, which would normally have been used for other expansion cards. The main feature of 680i SLI was support for SLI with a full 16 lanes of the PCI Express bus for each card. The original Asus Striker Extreme used the nForce 680i SLI chipset so it seems fitting that the Striker II Formula uses the new Nvidia 780i SLI chipset.
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