Overclocking
Early BIOS and Overclocking Issues
While most of the earlier reviews of the Asus Striker Extreme have been positive in the overclocking department, the majority of them did not attempt to stress the overclocking on the motherboard to the same levels that NVIDIA was pushing their reference platform, and thus the EVGA 680i motherboard we reviewed initially.
To me, that is a grave error: when comparing motherboards of the same chipset, it really comes down to features and overclocking to differentiate between them. And just because the motherboard’s BIOS says it can go to 3000 MHz FSB, doesn’t really mean it will, as we found out with our early BIOS revisions on the Asus Striker Extreme.
Frankly, when I first got this board months ago, the overclocking on it just sucked. We had horrible overclocking limits compared to what Asus said they were getting in house. Since I didn’t feel right posting a review with possibly promblematic overclocking results, I held off and worked with Asus to find a solution to the problems. Those reviews that glossed over the overclocking issues or didn’t even bother to stress them really did a disservice to the enthusiast giving false hope when it could not be fulfilled.
Several BIOS revisions later, and stopping at 0505, we had a solution, a well overclocked motherboard and successful review!
Overclocking Results
After a lot of work from both our testing and Asus’ PR and engineering teams, here is what we can report for overclocking on the Asus Striker Extreme!
Stock settings with our Core 2 Extreme X6800
Max FSB overclocking
Though not quite up to the 2000 MHz+ FSB we were getting with the EVGA motherboard, a 1950 Mhz FSB is definitely a steller overclocking performance, all without having to dramatically increase any voltages.
