Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer has unleashed its top-tier motherboard offerings during the CeBIT expo, and showcased an impressive motherboard built in collaboration with Republic of Gamers, as well as a sample of the DeLuxe P5Q3 Wi-Fi-based offering.

The Striker II Extreme motherboard from Asustek is a whole new platform for gamers, developed with the close collaboration of Republic of Gamers. In fact, as far as it has been announced during the show, the Striker II Extreme is one of the first collaborations of this kind, which resulted in a state-of-the-art, solid and powerful motherboard aimed at hardcore gaming market.

The Striker II Extreme comes with a LGA775 socket and is based on Nvidia's nForce 790i UltraSLI chipset, that features full support for DDR3 memory all the way up to 2000MHz. A-Data and Kingston are already shipping 2000+ MHz to fuel the hottest gaming rigs around, and the Striker II Extreme can accommodate them as well.

The motherboard comes with built-in voltage LEDs that are scattered around the PCB, reflecting the CPU, DDR, northbridge and southbridge voltages. This kind of info is important especially for hardcore overclockers and allow them to monitor the system's status at a simple glance. The LEDs offer three color codes associated with their corresponding meaning: green stands for normal operation, yellow for high-voltage and red for insane overclocking.


The motherboard supports the latest of Intel's processors, such as the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme offerings in the LGA775 package. The Republic of Gamers edition is built using the best hardware components that deliver the fastest response time, while preserving the system's stability, even when severely overclocked.

Asustek has also showcased a prototype of another Republic of Gamers version. Its technical specifications are still kept under the deepest secret, but, as far as we could dig, it will work with Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor and will come with multi-VGA support.

Live report by Bogdan Popa and Alex Vochin from CeBIT 2008 Hanover, Germany.