ASUS Blitz Formula & Blitz Extreme – Features and Layout

The ASUS Blitz boards are another pair of board whose only difference is the memory they hold. From the name you can tell that this board is a premium gaming board, like the earlier Striker and Commando boards. In fact, the Blitz boards have the onboard buttons, lights, and LCD poster found on the Striker Extreme. This is the highest end P35 board from ASUS because of these visual features. But what else do the Blitz boards bring to the table?

A first look at the board shouldn’t awe anyone. In fact, nothing on the board really stands out. The cooling looks rather restrained with only one heatpipe connecting the bridges and heatsinks. Even the MOSFET cooling is tiny. The board looks empty, but that’s actually a positive trait of ASUS’s great layouts. The CPU socket area is bare, so even the largest coolers should fit.




The expansion slots are very standard. They are arranged in a special way to fit other components onboard. The first slot is a black PCI Express x1 slot. It’s colored that way to accommodate a detachable sound card from ASUS. The other two PCI Express x1 slots are there to fit the CrosslinX chip. This chip is a unique feature from ASUS. It is designed to provide all the PCI Express graphics lanes from the P35 Northbridge, rather then half from the Northbridge and half from the Southbridge, which creates a theoretical bottleneck. NVIDIA eliminated this bottleneck when SLI first came out on their nForce 4 boards. However, it did not make a difference in performance because even now video cards don’t fully utilize all 16 lanes of a standard PCI Express Graphics (PEG) slots.


ASUS uses some of the controllers from the P5K Deluxe board, but also introduces some new ones as well. The Winbond monitoring chip is the first of two controllers carried over. All the monitoring chips have the same design, so this chip is the least significant of the onboard controllers. Next are two controllers right next to each other. The Marvell chip handles one of the onboard Ethernet ports. Next to it, a VIA VT6308P Firewire controller manages one Firewire port on the back panel and one header on the motherboard.

The next two controllers are both JMicro controllers. The first is from the Blitz Formula board. It controls two of the six onboard SATA connectors. The second controller is from the Blitz Extreme, which has two eSATA ports on top of the DDR3 it supports.




The bottom corner of the Blitz boards is not cluttered. ASUS manages to distribute all the connectors around the edge of the board. You can see three blue USB headers, a power and reset button onboard, a couple of fan connectors and six sideways placed SATA ports. The black IDE port is also placed at the edge on its side. This is the ideal placement, unlike the sideways placed port on the P5K Deluxe boards.


The RAM slots are far from the CPU socket, so they won’t interfere with any CPU coolers. The slots pictures support DDR2. Next to it are the standard floppy and ATX power connectors. On top is a very strange looking Northbridge cooler. Not only is it small, but whatever fins it has are also covered.


Lastly, there are two rubber covered tubes sticking out. As you may have guessed, this is an optional water block for the chipset. To water cool other boards, you’d have to take off the ornate copper cooling, losing all effective cooling around the socket. Then you’d have to spend extra money to buy cooling for the MOSFETS and Southbridge if you decide to water cool your Northbridge.

ASUS solves that problem with their Fusion cooler, a unique feature to the Blitz boards. If you want to water cool your chipset, you can. If you want to leave it air cooled like most users, you can do that too. However, this does bring up another problem. The heatsink is small and covered so its effectiveness will be limited compared to the standard Northbridge coolers. This will affect overclocking numbers negatively. We’ll see how the Blitz boards overclock later on.



ASUS includes a nice bonus first included with the Striker Extreme. This second generation SupremeFX II sound card attaches to any PCI Express x1 slot. One slot is colored black on the Blitz boards to designate its recommended placement. Underneath the pretty aluminum covering, the SupremeFX is nothing more than an audio controller on PCB with 8 channel outs. These ports can’t fit on the back panel because of the Blitz boards’ arrangement so ASUS made this a feature. In reality, it is nothing special, just more “bling” to your system.

The rear panel closely resembles that of the Blitz boards. There are six USB ports, two Ethernet jacks and Firewire. The boards have a button to clear the CMOS like the Striker Extreme.


The Blitz Extreme has two eSATA ports, while the Blitz Formula just has an empty space. ASUS should have stuck to just changing the memory slots like Gigabyte, not all other features on the board.

Overclocking

We mentioned that the Blitz boards had a weak Northbridge cooler. That seems to be the only issue though. All other cooling is adequate, and the BIOS is top notch. ASUS uses the P5K Deluxe boards’ BIOS for the Blitz boards. The DDR2 Blitz Formula board reached 518MHz, which is a little low for a P35 board of this price and features. The board reached 500MHz quickly, but even with the LCD poster and good BIOS, we didn’t get much farther after that. The Blitz Extreme did even worse, only barely passing 500MHz to 507MHz.

Once again, we have to mention that past 333MHz (the P35 boards’ rated speed), overclocking these boards is a gamble. Some board will clock high, and others lower. This is just a rough idea of how the same board may do. We can tell that cooling greatly impacted the result here.