ASUS Striker II NSE (NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI)
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Date: 13.06.2008
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Overclocking and stability
Now let's look at the power converter. It uses a 8-phase power scheme, in which there are two 270 mkF and eleven 560 mkF capacitors.
As we already stated, there are massive radiators on the power components. On installing a powerful CPU cooler, these radiators are cooled by the incident air flow. Otherwise (e.g., with a water-cooled system on), the user can install an additional fan (available in the package bundle).
Now move on to examining the overclocking features which are gathered in the "Extreme Tweaker" section.
ASUS Striker II NSE allows adjusting the FSB speed within 100 MHz to 750 MHz.
The user can change the HyperTransport bus multiplier:
Besides, the PCI Express bus speed is adjustable within 100 MHz to 200 MHz (in 1 MHz increments). At the same time, the bus speed for the third (central) slot can be set independently.
If necessary, the user can change the processor's multiplier (which is locked towards the increase in all Intel processors):
The adjustment range is within 6 up to the maximum, in 0.5-1 increments. The next feature allows adjusting voltage on the CPU (Vcore) within 1.1V to 2.4V in 0.00625-0.025V increments.
The next feature raises voltage on the memory modules:
The adjustment range for Vmem is extremely wide (within 1.5V to 3.1V in 0.02V increments)! Moreover, there are a few more settings that allow adjusting voltage on the memory controller, which can be done independently for each link and each DIMM slot:
There is also a couple of useful features for adjusting voltage on the chipset. The voltage adjustment range is within 1.3V to 2.2V in 0.02V increments:
The voltage adjustment range on the south bridge is is within 1.5V to 1.875V in 0.05V increments:
Then, ASUS Striker II NSE allows adjusting the PLL voltage within 1.5V to 3.0V in 0.02V increments:
Besides, the overclocker can adjust voltage on the CPU VTT within 1.2V to 1.55V in 0.05V increments:
The board does not support the CPU dynamic overclocking feature ("NOS") which was implemented on the first version of the Striker model.
However, there is a feature for automatic setting of all the required parameters during overclocking to a fixed value (selection of overclocking rate is defined in percentage).
Besides, the beginner overclocker can make use of the "CPU Level UP" and "MEM Level UP" features:
Overclocking from within Windows is done with the Ai Suite utility.
Now on to the practical overclocking.
That is the highest FSB result for a motherboard based on the NVIDIA chipset that has been fixed at our test lab. During the overclocking experiments we came across no issues and found no signs of a strange behavior of the board (as it used to be with ASUS' previous motherboard based on NVIDIA chipsets).
We also add that this result was achieved without using a water-powered cooling system, at the north bridge voltage = 1.48 V. Higher Vdd voltage resulted in the reduction of stability, which points to the need for using a water-powered cooling system during extreme overclocking (starting with FSB=550 MHz).
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