Specifications

So, we got our hands on the sister of a well-known ASUS Striker Extreme - ASUS Striker II NSE mainboard based on Nvidia nForce 790i SLI chipset. These two mainboards differ by their chipset North Bridges. Extremely pricy Striker II Extreme is based on nForce 790i Ultra SLI, while a more affordable Striker II NSE is based on nForce 790i SLI. The specifications of our today’s testing hero, ASUS Striker II NSE, look as follows:

If we compare these specs to ASUS Striker II Extreme, we will see that there are hardly any differences. All the differences lie in the Memory: they claim that Striker II Extreme supports memory up to DDR3-2000 SDRAM, while Striker II NSE stops at DDR3-1600. It is hard to tell what they actually mean by this, since our Striker II NSE allowed setting memory frequency at up to 3000MHz. So, this difference between the two mainboards seems to be just a formality, which may, however, save you about $75.

As you can see from the specification table above, ASUS engineers considered Nvidia nForce 790i SLI functionality to be quite sufficient for a mainboard from a top price range. Therefore, almost all Striker II NSE features represent the chipset functionality. Besides the two main chips – SPP and MCP, they used an additional JMicron JMB363 controller providing a pair of eSATA ports and a VIA VT6308P IEEE1394 controller.

So, even though ASUS engineers designed their own Nvidia nForce 790i SLI based mainboard layout different from the reference, they didn’t create anything unique from the functional standpoint. ASUS Striker II Extreme and NSE offer almost the same features as top of the line mainboards from EVGA, XFX and other manufacturers. Even the number of slots is identical: ASUS mainboards have two PCI Express x16 2.0 slots, one PCI Express x16 slot of the “old” type, two PCI Express x1 and two regular PCI slots.