Asus Striker Extreme + Q6600 newbuild

Mubbers

Shoot!
Political Access
Joined
28 Dec 2001
Messages
1,087
I'm just finishing building a new system to replace the one I put together in 2003 (yes it lasted that long!).

I'm basing it on the ASUS Striker Extreme MOBO and have the following components:

Thermaltake Toughpower 850 watt PSU
Intel Q6600 2.4 GHZ CPU (overclockable)
2 x NVidia 8600 GT Super 512 (for SLI)
Arctic 7 CPU fan (a tight fit)
4 GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 RAM
2 x WD Caviar 500 GB drives in RAID 1 (I chickened out of RAID 0 after an accident on my last PC!!)
Samsung SH023B DVDRW

I've put it all in a rather nice looking Thermaltake Tsunami Dream mirror black Aluminium case.

I thought quite some time about the OS and wanted really to go for 64bit Vista. In the end though I'm putting boring XPSP2 on just now and will wait a few more months before thinking about Vista due to the compatability issues at the moment. When I switch to 64bit I'll upgrade the memory to 8GB.

Mostly (so far) installation was pretty straight forwards (although I had to cut the corners off the Artic 7 fan to get it to fit past the MOBOs heat sinks.

A couple of things stood out so far as being a bit dull:

1. I had to rip the floppy disk out of my old PC and scrape about for some (very old) 3.5" disks so I could load the SATA/RAID drivers during XP installation. I thought the FDD was obsolete?

2. After I'd configured the BIOS I shut the system down to disable the case tamper switch (this got very boring!) it then wouldn't power up <gulp>. Only after some frantic searching of the ASUS website did I learn that the MOBO LED light switch has to be OFF in order to allow re-boot.

HUMBUG! They could have put this in the manual - I nearly died of heart failure :suprised:
 

Attachments

  • post-build.JPG
    post-build.JPG
    927.3 KB · Views: 1,221
Things to add:

The PSU is great because it only comes with the basic cables permanently attached. You can then add extra cables as required which keeps down the mess inside your case.

The Samsung DVD drive is virtually silent.

The PC itself is also extremely quiet despite 6 huge fans inside.

The BIOS was super easy to programme. The options were very clear and a big improvement over the ASUS P4P800 I had before.
 
Question.

Why bother with 2 8600's?

Why not simply get a more powerful card for the same money.
 
No it wasn't that.

I'm not even going to bother justyifying it. I got them and that's it. Sorry.

Is there anything else wrong with what I got, perhaps you'ld like to continue...
 
No, it's a nice system. I was looking over it and this just stuck out. I wasn't sure if there was a justification, i.e. for a special program or something and therefore my curiosity urged me to find out why you purchased those 2 cards instead of something else.
 
Mmmmh I was a bit tetchy last night 100+ windows updates will do that to a person - sorry.

No, it's a nice system. I was looking over it and this just stuck out. I wasn't sure if there was a justification, i.e. for a special program or something and therefore my curiosity urged me to find out why you purchased those 2 cards instead of something else.

Ah well now you've put it like that It's a bit of a story.

I bought the first 8600 GT as a replacement for the card in my old system a couple of months back. Not too expensive but not too bad either.

I hadn't realized that time had passed so much since I built the old system - it wasn't PCI Express!

When I decided to build the system I wanted to try the SLI feature so it seemed natural to buy a chum for the card I already had.

First impressions are awesome. I loaded UT2K4 and with absolutely everything maxed out it runs smoothly even at the accelerated game speeds UT gives you.

I'll give a blast with STALKER later.

Does Unleashed know something about the Striker I don't? I read a couple of online reviews which didn't highlight anything bad :s
 
The striker has a bad reputation vis-a-vis stability :)

BUT, it's a solid board and I think with the frequent bios updates, it is a relatively solid now.
 
Ha - I'm not laughing now coz about 1 hr ago just after my last post the whole thing went belly up.

The RAID one came up as "degraded". It won't repair and now the bios wont recognise the drives at all so I can't do anything with them.

arrgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
 
Good choice!

Just yesterday my new toys arrived: Striker Extreme, Core 2 Quad (Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz), GT8600GT Silent 512 MB, 2x Samsung 500 GB SATAII and ... Asus Silent Knight cpu cooler.

The whole idea was to put the SATA drives in Raid0 (striping)but Windoze XP does not detect the Raid config during setup :dead:
Looking at your problems I think I'll just skip the raid thing and go for old fashioned SATAII :squareeye

The noise from the Silent Knight is a bit disappointing, the fan does not have PWM control and makes defenitely more noise than the cooler that came with the boxed intel Q6600. That one does have PWM control, makes almost as much noise as the Silent Knight during booting but goes to 1200 rpm as soon as the bios is initializing; which is a lot less noise. But I tested this outside of the midi tower which still has to arrive ...
Surprisingly the addition fan (4..5 cm fan to be used when heatpipes have no forced air flow from CPU or case fan) is very silent and gives quite a bit of airflow.

Anyway, I added some pictures of the Silent Knight on the Striker Extreme board. Looks fairly extreme to me.

Pics (from left to right):

  1. Retention bracket just fits (had to bend the heatpipe a little bit)
  2. Other side of the retention bracket, that's also a snug fit!
  3. The Silent Knight hovers above the heatpipe coolers of the mobo
  4. Too bad the new midi tower is not an acrylic one :cool:

Due to noise from the Silent Knight I may decide to rework the cooler with the original Intel one. With a Toughpower 750 PSU with cablemanagement and HDs mounted in vibration dampening brackets this system should be a silent system...

And temperatures:
  • CPU: 27 C, 31 C with the fan switched off
  • Mobo: 38 C, tried to add one or two Titan 80mm case fans (very silent) but that did not make any difference
  • GT8600 Silent: 65 C and smells a bit ... moved the titan 80mm fan which dropped temp to 46 C

Everything measured with the mobo flat on my workbench and temp. monitoring from bios - so no real work going on.

Rob - will update as soon as tower arrived
 

Attachments

  • IMG_1436.JPG
    IMG_1436.JPG
    63.9 KB · Views: 349
  • IMG_1438.JPG
    IMG_1438.JPG
    48.9 KB · Views: 363
  • IMG_1440.JPG
    IMG_1440.JPG
    67.2 KB · Views: 637
  • IMG_1441.JPG
    IMG_1441.JPG
    67.9 KB · Views: 1,112
Buy a zalman fan-mate and control your fan speed using that. I have 2 in my system and it definitely helps out a fair deal.
 

Members online

No members online now.

Latest profile posts

Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
Xie wrote on Electronic Punk's profile.
Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
Electronic Punk wrote on Sazar's profile.
Rest in peace my friend, been trying to find you and finally did in the worst way imaginable.

Forum statistics

Threads
62,015
Messages
673,494
Members
5,621
Latest member
naeemsafi
Back