I was going to post this as a separate thread. there are several threads I find here that focus on the same quandary and misgivings people have about the 680i chipset.
I've approached this business cautiously, and have been no less pleased with the Striker than I was with my P4P800-SE boards before PCI_E and DDR2. I respect AigoMorla's opinions, but we probably differ on the viability of the 680i chipset. Even so, there were several problems with the eVGA, nVidia and other incarnations, and the Striker had seriously ambivalent customer reviews and quirks through the earlier BIOS revisions. In fact, those reviews are STILL ambivalent, and I must attribute some of the trouble to people who didn't know what they were doing with the board, and other things less dependent on user skill and experience.
I cannot for the life of me understand how a board can be both C2D and C2Q compatible through Kentsfield G0, how the manufacturer can tout it as "45nm compatible," then certify it for dual-core Wolfdale but not for the double-Wolfdale Yorkfield. Maybe I need to look again at how intel chose to integrate the cores on these two CPU models of Penryn.
But a recent review here at Anantech (or was it THG) doesn't pose a distinction or problem with general Penryn compatibility for this board.
And here's where my old "surfing" analogy for choosing parts and technology-upgrades comes to the fore again. The Striker (IMHO), exemplifies a more general pattern in the release of motherboard products, wherein a flurry of BIOS revisions over six to ten months would make the difference between not buying it "then," and then buying it "later."
Now if the 780i is just a reissued 680i with various improvements, that pattern is less applicable. But in general, it drives my choice of when to upgrade and what to spend on it. For that, I"ll stay out here paddling to keep afloat, and may just wait until the entire industry has moved into DDR3 territory with these boards and the processors have gone through a revision after being on the market for at least six months.
One thing for sure, though. I'm less eager to "assure" myself that I will have SLI compatibility without immediately realizing SLI in my purchases and configurations. And expect some major innovations in GPUs over the next year. If SLI doesn't mean anything to me anymore, it opens up a much wider horizon of upgrade possibilities than what you get exclusively with nVidia chipsets.
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