The Striker Extreme's array of innovative features and decadent extras is enough to make any enthusiast swoon, but with street prices drifting well over $300, it costs more than what most enthusiasts can afford—or at least more than most of us are willing to pay. We enthusiasts tend to be reluctant to shell out for high-end products when the market is peppered with mid-range gems that cost less than half as much as the opulent Striker.

One of those mid-range gems might just be Asus' own P5N-E SLI. The P5N-E lacks many of the extras that come with the Striker—including the fancy heatpipes, flashy lights, and LCD display—but you still get nForce 650i core logic, passive chipset cooling, SLI support, and enough BIOS-level overclocking options to exploit the full potential of a Core 2 Duo. With motherboards doing little to affect overall system performance, especially when it comes to applications and games, the P5N-E SLI should be every bit as fast as the Striker.

Clearly, we had to put these boards to the test to see how a mid-range mobo like P5N-E SLI stacks up against the flagship Striker Extreme.

Board specs
The P5N-E SLI and Striker Extreme sit at opposite ends of the motherboard spectrum, and as one might expect, the differences between the boards is apparent with a cursory glance at their spec sheets.

Both boards draw from Nvidia's new nForce 600-series chipsets, but that 600 label really only applies to the north bridge chip. The Striker sports the nForce 680i SLI SPP, while the P5N-E is equipped with the 650i SPP. The two north bridges are likely the same chip, but several features are only available with the pricier 680i. For example, the 680i can handle memory with Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP), but Nvidia doesn't officially support EPP on the 650i. The 680i also boasts front-side bus speeds up to 1333MHz for future processors, while the 650i is limited to the 1066MHz front-side bus frequency of Intel's current lineup.

Things get even more interesting at the south bridge, where we find the P5N-E fitted with an nForce 430i. The nForce 430 initially debuted with Nvidia's GeForce 6150 integrated graphics chipset more than a year and a half ago, and the chip's age is starting to show. Four Serial ATA ports and a single Gigabit Ethernet connection may be enough for most folks, but it's less than what you get with the nForce 680i SLI MCP, which has six SATA ports and dual GigE controllers. Those dual GigE connections can be combined to form a pseudo-2Gbps connection, and they both feature TCP/IP offloads to help lower CPU utilization—capabilities you don't get with the 430i.

The nForce 430i pulls up a little short in the PCI Express department, as well, forcing the P5N-E to split 16 lanes of bandwidth evenly between two graphics cards running in SLI. No such limitation plagues the Striker, which employs the 680i chipset's whopping 46 lanes of PCIe connectivity to provide each card in an SLI pair with a full 16 lanes of bandwidth. As if that weren't enough, the 680i also supports LinkBoost, which cranks up the chipset interconnect and PCIe reference clocks by 25%. We have yet to see LinkBoost offer a meaningful increase in actual application performance, though.

Both south bridges feature "Azalia" interfaces for High Definition Audio. Lately, Asus has favored codec chips from Analog Devices, so it's no surprise to see the AD1988B on the Striker Extreme. However, the P5N-E is sporting Realtek's six-channel ALC883 codec. Apparently, not even the mighty Asus could completely claw its way out of the crab's clutches.