Striker Extreme CPU INIT

hi i had same problemcheck your pins on the socket i traced my fault to 1 of the pins not making contact it was snapped down to changing cpus 2 many times
 
I am glad I have found this thread as I was starting to think it was me.

I was asked to install this board and it has caused me and the PC owner nothing but grief. As said before it is literally one thing after another. I have installed 100's of motherboards and processors but this is the worst I have ever seen.

It went together ok and loaded Vista fine. But ever since my phone has not stopped ringing with problem after problem. What a piece of junk.
 
Feel disheartened at Striker II, its got no leds inside like previous bling Model.

It does have 3 LED's for each Voltage settings ( CPU/RAM/NB/SB etc ) that are Green, Orange or Red if you and change colour depending on on high or low you set Voltage.

The LCD Poster is seperate and hangs by a wire if you need move PC be carefully + its ugly like a alarm clock.

It has NO ESATA ( you would need use 1 of the 6 Nvidia SATA Ports and buy the Akasa ESATA Kit ).

It has 1 PS2 Keyboard Port ( I hate USB for Mouse+kB)

Disgrace for the £££ Mobo in the stores on 780 (without special WC Mobos), even the MSI version has ESATA.
 
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BTW, There is a Sticky in the Motherboards Thread on the Asus Forums.

The site is hosted on a P1 and ran on a 14k modem so be warned, its slow 99% of the time and has been since I 1st used it in 2001.
 
Well, this thread makes for pretty depressing reading.

Speaking personally, I certainly can't conclude that the Striker-E is worse than any alternative 680i board.

The original EVGA was terminally flawed (SATA related data corruption) - the A1 revision supposedly fixed this and other minor issues, though EVGA's forums are still chock full of foam at the mouth rants!

I had an MSI-P6 diamond, worked fine for 2 weeks, then inexplicably froze during posting and utterly ceased to function thereafter - never once over clocked or overvolted.

Also tried the Gigabyte N680-DQ6 - memory hopelessly unstable at stock (modules worked without issue in other boards) and no way of manually altering the timings - sent back within two days.

As for the Striker, got one when it was released over a year ago - initially had problems with the x-fi (crackle pop etc etc) fixed via a BIOS update.
Worked brilliantly for four months and throughout hours of gaming (x6800 dual core/8800gtx SLI/4gb 800mhz Corsair at optimal 3-4-3-9 timings). Stupidly managed to drop my system on the floor (carpeted but hard) during a weekend of tinkering, still worked!!

Switched to a quad core chip (qx6800), still worked (4x sp2004 large fft/Blend for 20hours) and tons more gaming.

Finally ran into the notorious CPU-INIT problem when swapping power supplies (Enermax too noisy, wanted a quieter one). Tried all suggested remedies (swapping memory, 1 stick, different CPUs etc) no luck.

Ordered and fitted a new board (another Striker). Initiated an RMA for the "faulty" one, had the form ready to fill in but decided to leave the board unwired with "Clear CMOS" button pressed in and battery removed overnight, simply out of curiosity.

Tried it the next morning....would you believe...BACK FROM THE DEAD! Ran a gamut of tests (memtest multiple passes/games/sp2004 etc) stable as ever. Too late to send new board back, so sold old one on the bay instead.

Moving on...new Striker as solid as original...until...I decided to replace the memory - which I'd been using for a year but now needed for another system.

Wanted to get the same type (Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3), but this had been discontinued, so I had to settle for the closest match (Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C3DF) the same part (so I thought) but in "dominator" form.

To cut a long story short - too late!! - I'd have been better off sticking with the old memory in the Striker and installing the new (which required between 2.3 and 2.4v to operate at stock spec) in the secondary system.

It would appear the board's Achilles heal lies in its tendency to "chew up" memory when any voltage above 2.3v is applied (with or without active cooling). Evidence suggests this issue is manifest in all 680i boards and is not specific to the Striker, though it has been discussed in detail on Asus's forum. In my case, it took 3 fried sticks of memory before I was able to pinpoint why the board had suddenly started to behave so erratically!

Subsequently RMA'd the RAM and acquired two new pairs of Team Xtreem
3-3-3-8 PC2-6400C3 - all but identical to the original "non-dominator" Corsair and happy at 2.25v - system has been rock solid since.

So in conclusion - to anybody using, or planning on using this board, proceed with extreme caution when it comes to memory. If the spec necessitates any voltage above 2.3, best to give it a miss, especially if you are set on having 4 sticks. Moreover, if anything above 2.2 is required - in any scenario - I'd strongly advise that you invest in one of these, indeed, I'd almost insist on it:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-123-CS&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=399

The Striker ain't no saint, but when considering its origins and direct competition, I can't help but feel that Asus made a pretty good showing.:)
 
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balth_dire said:
So in conclusion - to anybody using, or planning on using this board, proceed with extreme caution when it comes to memory. If the spec necessitates any voltage above 2.3, best to give it a miss. Moreover, if anything above 2.2 is required. I'd strongly advise you to invest in one of these........
Click to expand...

See my earlier post in this thread:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=10718408&postcount=14

I'm running aQ6600 (G0) @ 1800 X 8 FSB (3.6GHz) with OCZ XTC SLi 8500 RAM (5, 5, 5, 15 @2.3V) with no problems at all.

Everyman and his dog is slating this board but I've had no problems with it even though I've been clocking the nuts off it since the day I bought it.

It IS certainly a fiddly board that requires a good technical knowledge and serious amount of time in tweaking and fiddling about but its definitely not the horror that people are making it out to be.

Bear in mind, its a top end board aimed solely at serious overclockers and tweakers. Its not the kind of board you just buy any old RAM, bung it in and expect everything to run sweet as a nut.

There were hundreds of posts like this a couple of years ago regarding DFI's NF4 SLi Expert board. There was nothing wrong with that board either, if you knew what you were doing :D
 
AndyOcUK said:
See my earlier post in this thread:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=10718408&postcount=14

I'm running aQ6600 (G0) @ 1800 X 8 FSB (3.6GHz) with OCZ XTC SLi 8500 RAM (5, 5, 5, 15 @2.3V) with no problems at all.

Everyman and his dog is slating this board but I've had no problems with it even though I've been clocking the nuts off it since the day I bought it.
Click to expand...

Well, at least it would appear to have a few defenders left!

May I ask, are you running two or four sticks of that RAM?

EDIT

It's ok, just noticed your sig, it's two! Problems always seem to arise when one attempts to run four AND insists on heavy overclocking, which I guess is to be expected, at least with NV chipsets.

I'd like to re-emphasise to those running 4 sticks at anything above 2.2v, some form of active cooling is essential. Without it, Memtest will almost certainly throw up errors following multiple passes.
 
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This may be off-topic, with my old Crosshair it used to show the "CPU INIT" message on the LCD all the time the machine was off, it'd boot without issues but all the time it was off, show that. Almost like it was complaining it couldn't initialise it while it was off. :P

This thread, as well as the many others, have definately put me off the Striker though. I don't consider myself an amateur but I don't feel like fighting with a new motherboard right now.
 
Just to add to the general slaughtering... good so see the striker get what it deserves... its a terrible terrible board along with the P5N32-E SLI... hideously unstable and won't overclock beyond 334FSB with any stability unless you spend hours and hours fine tuning EVERY possible option and even then you have a nasty balancing act on the northbridge of keeping it cool enough to be stable but also putting enough voltage through it to be stable and enough voltage makes it heat up like a mofo.

Really if you got one of these boards thats actually stable and overclocks well and doesn't throw a fit every time you change just one thing... you really really got really really lucky. I didn't even bother RMAing them in the end when the 3rd one went **** up I just ran as fast as I could to a good P35 board.

Its a shame tho because they are very feature rich boards and have very very good performance. But that can't make up for the general instability and random complete failures.
 
balth_dire said:
Well, at least it would appear to have a few defenders left!

May I ask, are you running two or four sticks of that RAM?

EDIT

It's ok, just noticed your sig, it's two! Problems always seem to arise when one attempts to run four AND insists on heavy overclocking, which I guess is to be expected, at least with NV chipsets.

I'd like to re-emphasise to those running 4 sticks at anything above 2.2v, some form of active cooling is essential. Without it, Memtest will almost certainly throw up errors following multiple passes.
Click to expand...

I'm now running 4 X 1Gb of the OCZ and its still fine.
ninja.gif
:D
 
Excellent!

Well, just keep a very close eye on them, the line between giving Micron D9s optimum and excessive voltages appears to be virtually non-existent on the 680i.

Of course, it could be that OCZ put their modules through more rigourous testing than Corsair, hence their of guarantee 2.35v is a worthy one. :)
 
Most people neglect that the Striker overvolts RAM. Thats why the individual bank compensation settings are useful.

In my experience, stuff rarely just fails without a reason :D
 
AndyOcUK said:
In my experience, stuff rarely just fails without a reason :D
Click to expand...

So what happened to your GTX then?? :D

Seriously though, I fully agree.

And yes, the Striker does indeed overvolt.

Something was definitely amiss with my Dominators though (TWIN2X2048-6400C3DF).

They are supposed to run at 2.4v. I had them at 2.325 - which in reality was 2.35 - with the fan bracket attached, and at this setting, following numerous hours of Prime 95, three individual sticks failed.

I've tried running 4 sticks of each of the below in the Striker:

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/364/corsair_6400c3.jpg

http://lp.pcmoddingmy.com/albums/userpics/TeamGroup/TXDD2048M800HC3DC/3.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y29/TDuiker/DSCF042_1.jpg

Only the top two were able to function steadily (prime stable) with a voltage of less than 2.3 (2.27 to be exact) at the optimal 3-4-3-9.

The Dominators appeared stable at these settings, but couldn't sustain multiple instances of Prime. With the voltage upped to 2.325, they would be be stable for hours and I'd assume all was well.

However, I'd then encounter numerous instabilities, even amidst general use, and upon running memtest in each of the three cases, one of the sticks would be shot - multiple errors at the same address.

It's interesting to note that Corsair's original "non-dominator" modules (TWIN2X2048-6400C3) and the Team Xtreem (TXDD2048M800HC3DC) offer identical performance to the Dominators (same latencies), but officially only need 2.2v to run (2.27v in my case, as 4 sticks are installed) wheras the Dominator's defualt spec is 2.4v and in practice, it would appear they simply can't run in 4s when used with the Striker. I'm still unclear as to why Corsair didn't continue to use chips that could operate at the lower voltage.

Sorry to bang on ;):D.
 
That's very interesting, many thanks.

So the Xtreem's and Dominators use D9GMHs whereas the earlier Corsairs used D9GKXs and the latter would appear to be more reliable at their module's default spec by virtue of the absence of "handpicking".

Still odd that the Dominators are sold preset to 2.4v yet in that document they are said to be tested at 2.2.

Anyhow, I hope all holds up for both of us.
 
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