ASUS Striker II (NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI)
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Date: 02.04.2008 |
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ASUS Striker II Features and Layout
Once ASUS started integrating water-blocks into the cooling system of motherboards, no one is longer amazed by regular radiators. There are so many radiators and pipes on the Striker II motherboard: radiators are installed on top of all the major components of the board, with pipes interconnecting the radiators.
We should also note that positioning of the main components of the motherboard does not create any issues for the assembly operator. In particular, the main 24-pin power connector is installed on the board's bottom edge, with the additional 8-pin connector (the backward compatibility to the PSU with a 4-pin cable has been preserved) - on the right-hand edge:
For the convenience of plugging in a 4-pin cable, the "redundant" pins are closed with a plastic lid.
In fact, there can be found something to find fault with the PCB design: after installation of a full-length PCI-Express video card into the first slot, DIMM slots are partly blocked.
Near these slots there is a 4-pin CPU_FAN connector to plug in the processor cooler.
Besides it, there are seven (!) more 3-pin connectors: CHA_FAN1 and OPT_FAN2 -near the PCI-E x1 slots, OPT_FAN1 and OPT_FAN3 - near the PCI2 slot, CHA_FAN2 - in the bottom-left corner, with CHA_FAN3 and PWR_FAN near the DIMM slots. Note that the Striker II board not only determines the rotational speed of all the eight fans but also controls their speeds depending on the temperatures.
On the north bridge, there is an impressive radiator connected to the radiators of the south bridge and the power supply module with heat pipes.
There is also a small radiator on the nForce 200 bridge which is linked to the remaining cooling system via a heat pipe.
Under the north bridge, there are four DIMM slots. The maximum memory capacity makes 8 GB.
To enable the dual-channel mode, the memory modules should be inserted into the slots of the same color. Once voltage is applied to the board, illumination of the Power and Reset buttons, as well as that of the decorative block (with an illumination) lights up on the NB radiator.
As regards the expansion options, the board uses three PCI Express x16 slots (all with holders) as well as two PCI Express x1, and two PCI slots.
It should be noted that to the blue PCI Express õ16 slots there are 16 PCI-E version 2.0 bus lanes allocated, 16 - to the white PCI Express õ16 slot, albeit of version 1.0
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