ASUS Striker II NSE (NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI)
ASUS Striker II NSE - Layout and Features
The cooling system for ASUS Striker II NSE looks quite impressive, primarily due to the water block on the north bridge. This water block is aligned with a massive radiator, which allows overclocking the system without using a water-powered cooling system.
Also, rather large radiators are installed on the elements of the power converter on the south bridge as well, and they are all interlinked with heat pipes into a unified system.
We should note that the massive system for cooling 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_FAN2 and OPT_FAN2 - near the PCI-E x1 slots;
- CHA_FAN1 - in the upper right-hand corner of the board;
- OPT_FAN3 and CHA_FAN3 - on the left-hand side;
- OPT_FAN1 and PWR_FAN - near the DIMM slots.
Note that the Striker II NSE board not only determines the rotational speed of all the eight fans but also controls the speed of seven of them depending on the temperatures.
Let's once again look at the water block of the north bridge, which is connected to the radiators of the south bridge and the power supply module with heat pipes.
All the heavy radiators are fixed on the board with reinforcement plates which also do the job of heat rejection:
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 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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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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