ASUS Sabertooth P67 TUF review -
The Intel 68 series chipset
The Intel 68 series chipset
Paired with the new Sandy Bridge based processors come new motherboard chipsets, ten in total of which five are intended for desktop processors, namely the P67, H67, Q65, Q67 and B65. Next to the new chipsets there is also a small socket change. Previous Clarkdale Core series processors were seated onto a LGA 1156 package (socket). The new SB processors do not share that same socket, Intel placed them onto socket LGA 1155, one pin less.
The primary reason here is that a last generation processor will not work with a series 6 chipset and vice versa. So you can't install by accident, a Clarkdale based Core i5 on a P67 motherboard.
Now, luckily this doesn't mean you'll be needing a new cooler, your old LGA 1156 CPU cooler is compatible with the LGA 1155 motherboard measurements. Let's have a look at the primary features of the 82P67 Platform Controller Hub chipset.
Segment | Corporate | SMB - B65 | Consumer H67 | Consumer P67 |
Socket | LGA 1155 | LGA 1155 | LGA 1155 | LGA 1155 |
Memory channels / DIMM per channel | 2 / 2 | 2 / 2 | 2 / 2 | 2 / 2 |
USB2.0 | 14 | 12 | 14 | 14 |
SATA Total (Max number of 6Gb/s) | 6 (2) | 6 (1) | 6 (2) | 6 (2) |
PCIe 2.0 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
PCI | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Integrated Display | 2 | 2 | 2 | n/a |
Performance Tuning | No | No | No | Yes |
Above, you can see the primary desktop chipsets released, H67 and P67 will be the two chipset you are dealing with. For end consumers like you and me the H67 chipset will be less performance targeted and comes with support for monitor connectivity.
The one significant difference in-between H67 and P67 is that the P67 does not support the embedded GPU inside the processor or any of its functions. P67 requires a dedicated graphics card.
The P67 chipset is targeted at performance and enthusiast end users, allowing much more tweaking and providing performance features. As you can understand, we'll be testing a lot of these chipset based motherboards, some of which will also have support for the new uEFI BIOS. A graphics user interface BIOS that is going to fascinate you.
Interesting to know is that the new 67 series chipsets will come with SATA 6G controllers and though not native, all of them will very likely come with USB 3.0 support by using a NEC controller. P67 will have 16 PCIe lanes available for your graphics card (x16) but can be split down into two x8 PCIe lanes for graphics cards if you like to pursuit multi-GPU setup, hence SLI and Crossfire will run quite well on them.
The Intel 82P67 Platform Controller Hub (PCH) SATA2 ports can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology.
Another change is that the chipset now comes standard with an Intel Gigabit LAN (Intel 82579V) controller, on the previous chipsets this was an optional for ODMs, this time around... it simply sits there and can be used by the motherboard ODM. So I expect a big increase in Intel based LAN connectivity the upcoming year, bad news for Realtek that is.
We review, test and benchmark the ASUS Sabertooth Z87 TUF series motherboard. The Z87 enthusiast themed mainboard is intended for Intel's 22nm Haswell processors on Socket LGA1150.
ASUS Sabertooth Z77 review
We review the ASUS Sabertooth Z77. Z77 is of course the Intel chipset predominantly released for Ivy Bridge based processors. This article is a full review of what you may expect from the TUF series Sabertooth Z77, have peek after which we'll dive right into the photo shoot.
ASUS Sabertooth Z77 preview
We preview the ASUS Sabertooth Z77 TUF. Z77 is of course the Intel chipset for the upcoming Ivy bridge based processors. These motherboards will have a slightly altered feature set and thus support them new upcoming apples from Intel. Good to know however is that Z77 also supports Sandy Bridge Socket 1155 based processors, that's right your favorite Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K will be perfect for these motherboards as well. The changes for Z77 primarily can be found in native USB 3.0 support as well as an upgrade towards PCie gen 3 PCIe x16 slots.
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX review
The TUF series (The Ultimate Force) Sabertooth 990FX is what we'll be placing under our microscope today, styled in the very same color as the earlier models with the ceramic design we see a lot of resemblances. But hey no tactical jacket anymore though. This AM3+ motherboard will be powered by a 10-phase Digi+ VRM. Socket AM3+ will support the Bulldozer based Zambezi FX Series Processors which launch later. The Sabertooth 990FX will come with four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel memory up-to DDR3-1866 MHz straight from the EFI BIOS. What you'll also notice is that the TUF (The Ultimate Series) has four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 PCIe graphics card slots based on what you use the slots for of course. Interesting fact is that this motherboard series now is SLI compatible.