ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX Motherboard Review @ OCWORKBENCH

Conclusion

Motherboards have gone through different evolutions, from no overclocking to multiple PCIe slots, from upgradable sockets to one socket fits all. The trend is now changing into making boards super durable for long term use.

 It is not difficult to identify the use of CeraM!X – Heatsink Coating Tech which gives a  50% Larger area for heat dissipation with the revolutionary ceramics-coating technology on parts of the board. The software TUF Thermal Radar is another feature that gives you Real Time Temp Detection and Heat Removal. Of course, there are the TUF Components (Alloy Choke, Cap. & MOSFET; Certified by Military-standard) that hardens it as a board well suited probably as a workstation.

As a AMD 990FX/SB950 mainboard, this board supports multi-GPU configurations through both SLI™ and CrossFireX using the 4 full length PCIe slots.  It also has ASmedia USB 3.0, SATA 6Gbps support, front panel USB, UEFI BIOS, eSATA, 8 ch audio, VIA 1394. ASUS could have made it even better with  the Lucid Hydra, allowing multi GPU mix and match.

Installation is a breeze as slots are spaciously seperated. The only regret I would say are the missing Power on/off , clear cmos buttons. Debug led is also missing from the mainboard.

Performance wise, we would expect little differences between AMD 990FX and AMD 890FX boards using the same 6 core processor as the 8 Core won’t be available until July-Aug 2011. In our comparison, we chose to compare it with a Core i5 2500K running at 3.3GHz. The performance is not that far off from the Intel counterpart. The good thing is that, on the AMD platform, you get full bandwidth PCIe slots for your graphics if you intend to use CrossFireX or SLI while the Intel only gives you a Dual PCIe 2.0 x8. Documentation is pretty detail but the packaging is pretty basic compared to RoG boards.

Overclocking wise, the board’s BIOS has lots of voltage and options available for tweaking. On our Phenom II X6 1100T, we manged to overclock the processor to 4.0GHz. Below is a screen shot showing the result. You can either overclock using the UEFI BIOS or within windows using TurboV EVO tool. The CPU voltage is set to 1.45v with multiplier set to 20X and CPU CLK o/c to 210MHz.

In Conclusion, the SABERTOOTH 990FX board is a future proof board that will probably last you for the next 5 years as it is made up of military grade components. The long lasting components will prolong it’s durability and stability. That is probably ASUS is giving it’s buyers a 5 years warranty for it’s product.  On the other hand, it is strange that ASUS omitted important push button on/off, clear cmos switches which are ‘default’ features on most other boards these days. If you were to choose between cost/performance, I think this board definitely worth considering if you intend to upgrade to 8 core processor from AMD.

Below are my ratings.

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.