ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX Motherboard Review @ OCWORKBENCH

Mainboard Layout

The mainboard has 4 full length PCIe slots for Quad CrossFireX or Quad SLI. In comparison with Intel counterparts, the AMD 990FX provides full bandwidth to it’s slots.  Other than the black colour slot which is hardwired at PCIe x4. The 3 other PCIe 2.0 slots operate in this manner (single x16, dual x16/x16, triple @ x16/x8/x8.

On the top left of the mainboard are the chipsets  and they include Realtek ALC892, VIA 6308 IEEE 1394 controller, Realtek 8111E GbE.

The SB950 south bridge is below the attached heatsink. On the side is the ITE I/O controller chip, EPU and ASMEDIA USB 3.0 controller (for front panel). There are also 6 SATA 6Gbps ports and 2 other SATA 3Gbps ports on the front panel of the board. The SB950 can support up to 14 USB 2.0 ports (4 port at mid board, 10 board at back panel).