ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard review

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Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

ASUS has a very sweet offering at hand with the Z87 based Sabertooth motherboard. Opposed to our other reviews from MSI and Gigabyte, this board is more price savvy, and you can see why ... no extra KillerNIC, WIFI, WIFI, buttons, Diagnostic LEDS and so on. The benefit is that it be a lower cost motherboard, we expect it to be at or under the 200 EUR marker. Obviously ASUS has an extensive range of motherboard for each price segment. But yeah the TUF series always has been designed with an affordable budget in mind. 

 

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Aesthetics

The new back-plate shield kicks ass, and makes this a very sturdy motherboard. Now we can discuss back and forth what the added benefit of the shielding is and if the prognosed airflow improvements actually make a difference. I'll leave that to you to decide, as I unfortunately am an uber-sceptic. Admittedly, the shields do look nice in an all black PC case, combine it with some liquid cooling on the processor and things will start to look rather shweeeeeet. However, and this might be a little personal,  I do start to dislike the brown/beige stuff on the SaberTooth for some reason. Then again mount a Noctua cooler on this puppy you got a rock solid color theme there. Perhaps a new color change for the upcoming releases, ASUS ? How about black/white/grey eh ? Overall though its a terrific looking motherboard with a proper layout

Performance

Overall non-overclocked performance as stated is above the baseline of the reference Z87 motherboards we tested, with an offset here and there of course. If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking in the UEFI bios simply hit performance mode and the 4470K processor was overclocked at 4300 MHz instantly. 

The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected and quite honestly this is what you'll see on all motherboards. We got the 4770K processor rocking stable at 4700 MHz with the memory (XMP enabled) at 2400 very easily, and that's not bad at all. However the CPU temperatures where nasty really. And yes we used the high-end D14 cooler from Noctua. As stated in the introduction, Haswell processors run hotter when overclocked opposed to Sandy Bridge, reaching 4600~4900 MHz might be easy to accomplish with the motherboard but you'll find yourself needing juice in the 1.35~1.45 Volts range of the processor and that requires massive cooling. So be prepared for processor heat, proper liquid cooling definitely deserves a recommendation here alright. 
 

Guru3d-recommended

 

Final words

ASUS has a nice offering at hand with their Sabertooth. The 8 SATA ports are very sweet: all SATA 6 Gb/s ports. You get 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the Realtek 1150 codec. The motherboard is multi-GPU / 2-way SLI and Crossfire ready. And sure add to that the sporty features the shielding the added airflow options, the software suite and so on. Currently the price point of the Asus Sabertooth ASUS Sabertooth Z87 is set at the 200 EUR market. For that amount of money you'll receive a very complete motherboard with a wide variety in terms of connectivity, design and features.  
 
The Z87 Sabertooth has the TUF third generation thermal armor. The TUF Thermal heatsink makes use of air cooling through a single fan that pushed cool air to the internal electrical components, and that is a nice plus. The ASUS series as always are easy overclock with and we had no problems running with 2,400mhz XMP profile on the Corsair memory. BIOS wise there are multiple voltage and power delivery options to handle any tweaking concern with care. Fiddle around with the multiplier and voltages alone is enough to reach 4.5 GHz on heatpipe based cooling. So yes, overall the ASUS TUF Sabertooth Z87 is definitely comes recommended.

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