Labs

At £214, this motherboard comes at an extraordinary price, but the Asus Striker II is no ordinary board. In terms of accessories and connectors, it's very similar to the Maximus, and offers all the same bells and whistles, including the LCD poster, thermal sensors and extensive overclocking features.

But while the X38-based Maximus uses AMD's dual-GPU CrossFire technology, the Striker's Nvidia 790i chipset supports quad SLI. Be warned, though: if you want to use four GPUs, you'll need at least one X2 card, as the Striker

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has only three PCI-Express 16x slots. Thoughtfully, a three-way bridge is included.

While the Striker shares the Maximus' overclocking-friendly BIOS, it ups the ante when it comes to internal frequencies. This board will let you run the FSB up to 1,600MHz and clock your DDR3 up to a ludicrous 2GHz - speeds no other board this month can match. But while it's nice enough to have these abilities, quad-GPU outfits and super-fast DDR3 DIMMs aren't cheap, and we've found they yield only marginal performance improvements.

It's a power-hungry board, too. Our minimal Striker II setup idled at 122W - this month's highest drain and nearly 30% higher than some other boards. You do get some power-saving software, though, to help manage the board's power consumption in Windows as far as possible.

The Striker II Extreme definitely isn't for everybody. Its feature set is impossible to fault, but even serious enthusiasts will get along just as well with the cheaper Maximus. The price does include a copy of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, but it's still a lot to pay for what practically amounts to bragging rights.