Recurring problem with striker extreme configuration
 

About a year ago I decided to me the leap to Intel's core 2 duo platform. At that time the Nvidia Nforce 680 SLI was the chipset of choice, so I went the asus striker extreme way.

What I got:

• Striker Extreme
• E6600
• Corsair HX520
• 2 GB Kit OCZ Urban Elite PC6400
• SB X-Fi Fatality
• GF8800 GTS 640 MB

Of course I tried overclocking. This gave me a lot of problems! I eventually got up to 3275 MHz (8x multi on 1637 FSB). This became rockstable when working gaming,... and has been for over six months.

But:
Before I got it stable it sometimes happened that my PC wouldn't boot anymore after a shutdown. Clearing the bios didn't help (clear bios switch, removing mainboard battery,...), disconnecting every drive, swapping RAM, exchanging the GPU with an old PCI-card,... nothing helped. It was very erratic and at some moment it would just come back to life and work again for weeks/months on end. I even replaced the CPU at one time, all to no avail.

What happened: my pc would boot, the 8800 GTS HSF would go to full speed but wouldn't throttle down as usual. My screen would remain blank, keyboard wouldn't respond, even the reset button wouldn't do anything.

Eventually I went to Bios 1002 and all seemed to be allright for over half a year. But today it happened again, so I had to fiddle for hours before it worked again. I flashed to the most recent bios today (1305) and hope that everything will remain fine.

I don't dare OC anymore right now...

Can anybody share some insight in all of this please?

Sounds like the board and something isn't quite getting along... unfortunately the Striker Extreme is well known for being especially finicky about hardware. Next time it happens I'd suggest swapping out the RAM with something else and seeing if that lets it boot. It's at least possible it could be a bad board, but I don't think so from the sound of it.

They sure ain't to happy to work alongside each other, that's a fact...