ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks
by Kris Boughton on April 11, 2008 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Intel 45nm Quad-Core Overclocking
Perhaps the greatest ability the ASUS Striker II Extreme has to offer is its amazing performance when overclocking 45nm dual-cores, 45nm quad-cores, and high-speed DDR3 memory. We have tested numerous motherboards built on many different platforms with several different chipsets but none has performed as well as the ASUS Striker II Extreme when it comes to overclocking our Intel QX9770. A little time spent with tweaking the GTL reference voltages and we found ourselves starting at a Prime95 stable system running a 45nm quad-core at 500MHz FSB.
 A 45nm quad-core at 500MHz FSB? Doth my eyes deceive me? |
We then turned our sights to memory overclocking and decided to see just how far we could push 8GB of OCZ DDR PC3-14400 Platinum Edition memory. One of the secrets to running high physical memory densities - whether DDR2 or DDR3 - is tRFC, an important memory timing parameter, necessary for the proper refresh of SDRAM circuitry. Although JEDEC provides different tRFC minimum value specifications for each device density, most overclockers ignore these values when it comes to achieving maximum system performance.
 While DDR3-2000 memory speeds may no longer be impressive to some, we tend to believe seeing this with 8GB of DDR3 is quite an accomplishment for today's boards. |
Because of the design of memory, SDRAM must be periodically refreshed in order to retain the validity of data stored in each memory cell. All banks of the SDRAM must be precharged and idle for a minimum of the Precharge Time (tRP) before this refresh command can be applied. Once the refresh cycle has completed all banks of the SDRAM will then be in the precharged (idle) state and a delay between the Refresh Command and the next Active Command or subsequent Refresh Command must be greater than or equal to the Refresh Cycle Time (tRFC).
Higher memory device densities with a greater number of SDRAM banks require more cycles to complete this refresh sequence. The number of clock cycles needed to satisfy the tRFC minimum specification for a system configuration consisting of a pair of 2GB modules, although not double that of 1GB modules, is still significantly higher - about 53% higher according to JEDEC figures - and installing four separate modules in place of two makes consideration of this timing even more critical.
 This is just the level of performance we have come to expect from DDR3. The fact that we can achieve this with 8GB though is simply awesome. |
Our greatest memory performance point actually came at DDR3-1600 (500MHz FSB and a 5:4 divider) with 8GB of memory. We could not get the system to run without errors with 8GB at DDR3-2000 with "P1" and "P2" enabled (we will talk more about these particular settings later in the BIOS guide). Backing down to DDR3-1600 and enabling these values boosted our memory read scores to almost 12GB/s.
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takumsawsherman - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
But for $400, you only get Firewire 400. Is that like a key, or something? If we pay $800 for a board, will they finally feel as though they can afford to add Firewire800, as Gigabyte did on their $200 boards like 3 or 4 years ago?When they talk about adding firewire itself to a board, does it never occur to them that a faster variation has existed for 5 or 6 years now? How insulting.
Grandpa - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
It doesn't matter what the price, performance, make, or model. If the board is unstable I don't want it! I had an Abit board once with a VIA chipset. It corrupted data when large files were transferred between drives. Several BIOS updates later, with the performance down to a crawl, it still corrupted data. Because of that ugly bad memory, stability is number one important for me. So this review is very relevant to others like myself.Super Nade - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
As far as I know, the capacitors you mention are made by Fujitsu's Media division (FP-Cap series), not Fairchild semiconductor. Fujitsu did try to gobble up Fairchild in the 80's, but the US government killed the deal. Apart from this, I am not aware of any connection between these two companies.Here is the link--> http://jp.fujitsu.com/group/fmd/en/services/capaci...">http://jp.fujitsu.com/group/fmd/en/services/capaci...
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Stele - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
Super Nade's right. The vendor marking on the capacitors - which have been the same for almost all such solid electrolytic polymer caps used on Asus boards for some time now - is very much that of Fujitsu: a letter 'F' in Courier-esque font between two horizontal lines.Interestingly - and confusingly - however, once upon a time this logo was indeed that of Fairchild Semiconductor... the deal that almost happened in the 80s may have something to do with Fujitsu's current use of the said logo. Either way, Faichild Semi have long since changed to their current logo (a stylised italic 'f') so today, any current/new electronic/semiconductor component carrying the F-between-bars logo is almost certainly a Fujitsu product.
jojo29 - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Just wondering how the Anandtech's Choice P5E3 Premium ( which i plan on buying) stacks up against this Striker? Any comments? Or did i miss something in the aricle as i was only able to skim through it, as im at work atm, and dontcoughwantcoughtogetcaughtbymybosscough...kjboughton - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
We used one X48 motherboard in this review and it was the ASUS P5E3 Premium. Enjoy the full read when you make it home. ;)ImmortalZ - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
You mention that overclocking the PCI-E bus provided tangible performance benefits on the EVGA board.Did you read about the rumblings around the net about some G92 based cards overclocking their GPU with the PCI-E bus? There are supposedly two clock sources for these type of cards - one on board and the other slaved to the PCI-E bus.
Are you sure that the performance improvement is not because of this anomaly?
CrystalBay - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Hi Kris, while UT3 does scale very well with multi-core. The game it self has no DX10 support as of yet. Hopefully EPIC will will enable it in a future update...Glenn - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
All the benchies and comparisons are great, but how does it compare to a P35 board? A 965 or X38 board? I doubt you will convert those that already own an X48 and I (P35) have no point of reference within this article to see if I'm 5, 10 or 25% behind the preformance curve?Rolphus - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Interesting review... only one question though. Why use the 32-bit version of Crysis on Vista x64? Is there an issue with the 64-bit version that I don't know about?