I dont know if I would call $300 "unbelievably high price".. but maybe ive always percived a highend/enthusiast mobo to be in this end of the price..

I have the Striker Extreme with QX6700 quad core processor. I had difficult time in raising my FSB beyond 1200 Mhz. I have 2 gigs of Corsair XMS2-2048 9136 C5D memory which I could not increase speed much beyond 800 Mhz. Flashed to bios version 803 and could no longer post (LCD poster remained at CPU INIT). RMA'd my board to newegg and waiting for return. To say the least, i am extremely disappointed with this ASUS product. Has anyone performed extensive tests using this processor and memory combo? Even a stock speeds (and still at Bios 701), 1 out of 2 warm restarts resulted in failed boots with LCD poster message of DET DRAM. Had to hit reset button. Don't know what new board will bring. Does anyone have an Intel alternative to the 680i chipset. I am not use SLI.

In a few words: this "fascinating" board may be designed for gamers, but it's very hard to actually run any games. You have to spend most of your time fighting with the system. There are problems with BIOS, Memory, SLI and Sound. In legal terms, one would call this a defective product.

i got this motherboard as well and it has allways been an pain to me

i cant even overclock my Q6600 any more as it results in Very hard Lock after desktop load whats very anoying, i had that chip running at 3.4ghz for 1-2 months then the pc started to hang droped it back an little untill it would not even go beyond default speed, it may be i over did the motherboard but CPU temps was below 60c chipset was actively cooled as well, i see what happens when i put this QX6850 in nice to have known about that 420mhz speed drop guess i can just set the ram to linked and see how far i go

found it hard at the time to find What setting i need to set to overclock on this motherboard, most likey broke somthing i guess (hopefuly its just the cpu)

i should of got an intel chip set any way as i do not use SLI