ASUS Sabertooth Z77 review -
Product Showcase
The entire motherboard is covered by a plastic shield called TUF Thermal Armor. Included are two fans which you can choose to use to cool down essential components on the motherboard. Passive cooling however works perfectly fine. Regardless, one fan can be positioned at the rear IO. And if you look at the square cover in the middle, that's where you can place a second one. If you use them, always place them in a push pull configuration.
To the right you can see an 8-pin power connector for the CPU. The board has a 8+4+4 power phase design. As for memory, it is a dual channel memory architecture. The board itself supports a maximum of 4 DIMM up-to 32GB of DDR3-1866/1600/1333/1066MHz. XMP profiles are supported of course.
When we flip the board around we see the 24-pin ATX power connector to the left, in the middle a USB 3.0 port connector and then the plethora of SATA ports. Let's zoom in at that, next page please.
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.