Extras and Installation
Included Extras
Asus has included a lot of goodies with their Striker Extreme motherboard.
First up, all of your SATA data and power cable needs are taken care of here as well as the single floppy and IDE cable you’ll need to build your system.
Part of the Republic of Gamers suite of items, Asus includes the EL back panel plate, one heat pipe fan (for users that want extra cooling or use passive/liquid cooling on their CPUs), temperature probes, a key chain, SLI connector, and Asus’ Q-connector device that makes installing the LED cables from you case to the motherboard MUCH easier. Asus even threw in a handful of zip ties to help tidy your case up.
Asus includes a full copy of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter in with the Striker motherboard as well as the drivers disc and Asus applications disc we expect. A single Firewire and USB 2.0 dongle are included to add more connectivity options to your system should you require it.
The “soundMAX” microphone that is supposedly able to pick up your voice and cancel out background noise (from your PC speakers and other). SoundMax has two microphones on the unit that are used to help in the software for noise reduction and it can attach to the top of your monitor via some included velcro.
The riser card is seen here for the on-board audio solution that includes all the 8-channel analog audio connections.
Installation
When we looked at the motherboard layout, we mentioned that the CPU cooling area seemed a bit tight.
The Intel stock cooler for the Core 2 processors fits nicely in between all the heat pipe fins as we see here and should also provide enough cooling to avoid the need for one of Asus’ external heat pipe fans.
Even the new Zalman CPU cooler fits well on the Asus Striker Extreme, though the amount of air flow going over the heat pipes is questionable.
