ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks
by Kris Boughton on April 11, 2008 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Game Testing - Crysis
A favorite action title among today's gamers is without a doubt Crysis from EA Games. The trouble is that building or buying a system capable of running Crysis at acceptable frame rates using higher resolutions with all the eye candy turned on is next to impossible. SLI scaling, and Crysis performance in general, has improved lately, thanks to a few of the more recent non-WHQL ForceWare driver releases from NVIDIA, but it's still not quite up to speed as far we're concerned. Perhaps the next generation of GPUs will address this problem head-on.
Assuming you game at 1280x1024, an Intel E8500 and even a single 8800GTS 512MB (G92) graphics card is more than capable of rendering Crysis at average frame rates around 50FPS and above. Unfortunately, gaming at this lower resolution is not always the norm and certainly leaves much to be desired when compared to the amazing image displayed on a larger 24" flat panel LCD.
This round of results seems to suggest that Crysis is somewhat sensitive to memory performance and memory access latencies, at least at lower resolutions. The EVGA 780i reference board and MSI PN7 SLI Platinum, both of which use DDR2, trail all other DDR3 boards, even with SLI enabled. We considered the possibility that the older PCI-e 1.x technology used on these boards was the bottleneck (remember, 780i's PCI-e 2.0 support comes from a non-native bridge chip) but quickly dismissed this idea - it is far more probable that either the CPU or the memory subsystems are the limiting factors, especially at this low resolution.
Interesting to note is that if you do plan to play Crysis at this lower resolution you may be better off overclocking your CPU than buying a second graphics card, given the choice between the two. Even better, spend the money you set aside for that second graphics card on a new 790i or X48 motherboard - our test results show these two top-end chipsets (using DDR3) in single-card configurations keeping up with 780i with two graphics cards in SLI. Of course, if you already own a 780i-based motherboard chances are you are running SLI already. In that case moving up to a 790i-based motherboard will net you 15% higher frame rates using today's latest WHQL-approved ForceWare drivers.
Performance scaling with Crysis at 1920x1200 is an entirely different ballgame - the bottleneck is no longer the CPU and memory subsystems as evident by the non-existent frame rate improvements when overclocking our E8500 from the stock 3.16GHz to 4.00GHz. In fact, SLI does little to help the situation when installed in 750i- or 780i-based motherboards. The EVGA reference 790i board and the ASUS Striker II Extreme demonstrate they are more than capable of handling the load when configured properly.
Even with the additional processing power provided by two more cores, the EVGA 780i trails all others when it comes to average frame rate. This is more evidence that tends to support our earlier assumption that Crysis is sensitive to memory bandwidth at lower resolutions. Moreover, the lack of improvement when compared to the dual-core results above clearly indicates that Crysis is unwilling to make efficient use of more than two cores. If playing this game is the purpose of your next build your money will be better spent on motherboard and DDR3 memory upgrades rather than the latest quad-core CPU.
Once again, our scores are limited by our graphics capabilities. The only thing that is going to improve these frame rates at this point is more powerful GPUs. Assuming Quad-SLI is optimized for this game, two 9800GX2 cards may provide us with the means to push nearly 60FPS on "High" settings - quite an achievement considering the ability of DirectX 10 shaders to bring nearly any graphics card to its knees.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
23 Comments
View All Comments
Rodriguez - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Can anyone here indicate how to reach FSB 500 (2000) with Striker II Extreme & QX9770 C1, most I can get is 1900FSB.I've seen Kris reach this speed in this article & was eager to get to this speed as soon as I received my new CPU, but it has been more difficult than I thought, I was sure that if with my previous Q6600 G0 y could easily get 1900/1950FSB, now with QX9770 would be peanuts. The main reason I bought this CPU was to run 2000FSB linked & synced with Ballistix 2000 SLI.
Please give all detailed BIOS setup options for this CPU if possible
Nobody in Asus forum using this setup has been able to reach 2000FSB, but I have seen a few reviews (like Anandtech's) & posts showing it's possible
By the way, memory has been tested unlinked at 2000Mhz 9-8-8-24, 1.9v P1/P2 Enabled & works great
System:
QX9770 rev. C1 3.2Ghz (watercooled)
Asus Striker II Extreme BIOS 801, ver 1.02G (watercooled)
PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W
4 x 1GB Crucial Ballistix PC16000 SLI EPP2 , 2000Mhz 1800 8-7-7-24- 1T - 1.9v
SLI Leadtek PX8800 Ultra Leviathan (factory watercooled)
SLI Leadtek PX8800 Ultra
Asus Physx card (removed)
Dlink DWA556 PCIx Xtreme N Wireless card
2x WD Raptor 150GB Raid 0 300GB
1x Seagate 400GB Sata
X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion
24' Benq FP241VW Gamer
Innovatek XXD Rev 2 + G-Flow water cooling
CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 case
Saitek X52 Flight system
TrackIR 4 + Trackclip Pro
Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit
parkerdw - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
I used the same motherboard and cpu, but I liquid cooled it using the gigantic Kandalf Liquid Cooled case. My memory is different as well since I use 4 GB of Patriot Viper memory (2 x 2GB). Other than the memory settings in the BIOS, I set everything to match this guide. My system runs at 4.0Ghz and the cpu runs at no more than 88 degrees fahrenheit even while playing something like Crysis with everything set to Very High. Crysis runs between 35 and 60 fps on Very High on my system using a single 9800 GX2 at 1280 x 720. It's a HTPC connected to my older 56 inch DLP set via DVI, so I can't go any higher than that, but I fully expect to run great at 1080p when I get my new large screen set later this year. I don't have my bios settings in front of me, but setting everything to Auto for the memory works PERECTLY at 4.0 ghz. Pretty cool. I think it's running at 8,8,18 or so and 1.9v.Also, Asus just released a patch to the bios that fixes the data corruption issue mentioned in this artcle. Released on 5/29/08 I think.
hardist - Monday, April 21, 2008 - link
The water block seems to have leaking issues , I am wondering why it was not covered in this review since it is a major feature of this board ......Heatlesssun - Sunday, April 20, 2008 - link
This is a sweet motherbaord! Now I've not overclocked the FSB, just bumped up the multiplier of my QX9650 from the default of 9.5 to 10, and I'm not running RAID. We shall see but I feel good. To get this up and running with Vista x64 in a day so smoothly was pretty good I thought.electricx - Tuesday, April 15, 2008 - link
So this board is going for the aforementioned amount on newegg... The EVGA and the XFX 790i boards are going for $350... The ROG name carries that much of a premium? I mean, come on?! I'm sure ASUS will fix this data corruption issue and you typically do pay more for the privilege(?) of being a beta tester for high end hardware but $1000 over competing products seems a bit much... The EVGA board is looking to be a clear winner here to me. Time will tell I suppose.FightingEagle - Friday, April 18, 2008 - link
After the second EVGA 790i and full of bugs I just sent it back. I was interested in the ASUS X48 and the 790i, but the 790i over $400 is hard to grasp. EVGA has good looking heat sink but not very good at cooling. I may wait for all the bugs to leave but as now im sitting on $320 dollars worth of DDR3 and a E8400.electricx - Tuesday, April 15, 2008 - link
Edit: That should have been $100 not $1000UK1Man - Sunday, April 13, 2008 - link
Help please!!I'm currently in the process of building a computer but can only afford to buy a couple of parts a month, I have already purchased some DDR2 (1066) memory for an FXF 780 motherboard (not yet purchased) but am now considering the Asus striker II extreme.
Will my DDR 2 memory work with this?
seamusmc - Monday, April 14, 2008 - link
This board/chipset, 790i, only supports DDR3.ianken - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
Can it go into S3 suspend and come back out and have the NICs still work? The Striker 2 Formula cannot.Can the SATA controller handle hot swap? The Stiker 2 Formula and the previous 680i boards could not. The 680i bios even had an esata setting that did NOTHING.
The latest crop of Asus boards, particularly the NV chipset rigs, have been pretty buggy and basic functionality has been borked.
But hey, who cares of the basics don't work right? it's got a water block for X-TREME OVERCLOXORS! YO! VTEC!