When Nvidia's nForce 680i SLI chipset was first introduced, enthusiasts decried the $250 price tag associated with the first wave of rebadged reference designs. Imagine, then, how shocked we were when we saw the Striker Extreme's price tag hovering around $330—nearly three times the cost of the P5N-E.

Enthusiasts may chafe at dropping three bills or more on a motherboard, but don't rule out the Striker just yet. Every market has a boutique niche, and as long as the luxury measures up to the price tag, there's nothing wrong with spending a little more—or in this case, a lot more.

At first glance, the Striker doesn't really exude the flash one might expect from a luxury mobo. I'd almost expected gold trim, or perhaps a spoiler. It does have ground effects, though. The board is dotted with blue LEDs—13 in all—which is just about enough to illuminate all of North Korea at night.

Again, we have to applaud Asus for putting the auxiliary 12V power connector along the top edge of the motherboard where cables won't crowd the CPU socket. The board sports an eight-pin 12V connector, but retains compatibility with power supplies that only offer four-pin ATX 12V plugs.

Asus surrounds the Striker's CPU socket with one of the most elaborate heatpipe arrays we've seen on a motherboard. Pipes snake their way through three blocks of radiator fins mounted on the board's north bridge and voltage regulation circuitry, walling in the socket on three sides. This arrangement doesn't leave much room around the socket for wider aftermarket coolers, but the radiator fins are only 40mm tall, so some larger coolers will fit.

Closer examination of the Striker's socket reveals the region to be largely free of capacitors. Asus has equipped the board with digital VRMs in an attempt to deliver cleaner, more consistent power the CPU. You won't have to worry about bursting caps here.

There's no need to worry about longer double-wide graphics cards creating clearance problems, either. The Striker's SATA ports face the edge of the board and won't interfere with even the mammoth GeForce 8800 GTX.

From this angle, we can also see the Striker's onboard power, reset, and CMOS clear buttons. Built-in power and reset buttons aren't that useful unless you're running a system on an open test bench, but the CMOS clear button should be something everyone can appreciate. It certainly beats fiddling with a jumper.

Asus even accommodates troubleshooting in the dark by lighting each of the Striker's onboard buttons—a rather useful feature to have if disaster strikes at a LAN party.

Now that you've been blinded by half a dozen or so blue LEDs, have a look at the Striker's slot stack. The board sports three PCI Express x16 slots, although the middle slot only gets eight lanes of bandwidth. Nvidia will presumably take advantage of this third slot, which appears on all nForce 680i motherboards, with a three-way SLI configuration or some sort of physics acceleration card somewhere down the road.

Don't mind what looks like a backward PCI Express x1 slot over to the left; it's actually an expansion slot for the Striker's audio riser card.

The riser moves the Analog Devices AD1988B codec chip off the board in an attempt to isolate it from board-level noise that can degrade output quality. This setup also allows Asus to equip the Striker with a full range of analog output ports, since there simply isn't any room for them in the crowded port cluster.

With two flavors of digital S/PDIF outputs, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, dual eSATA jacks, USB, Ethernet, and Firewire, the Striker's port cluster looks pretty stacked. Asus throws in an LCD POST code display that lets you troubleshoot boot process problems without even cracking open the case. There's also a handy button that controls the onboard lights in case you want turn them off for maximum stealthiness. That button would have been even handier—and a perfect complement to the POST code display—if it allowed you to reset the CMOS.

Premium products usually come bundled with all sorts of extras, and the Striker's box is filled with goodies, including a stereo microphone, an auxiliary fan for the chipset cooler, jumper blocks, and a keychain. The board also comes with a copy of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. You can find the game online for about $20, so it doesn't add a whole lot of value to the package.

A collection of three innocuous-looking temperature probes is the Striker's most intriguing bundled extra. These probes plug directly into onboard headers tied to three of the Striker's three-pin auxiliary fan mounts, providing an additional measure of temperature-based fan speed control through the BIOS. More on that in a moment.