Asus Sabertooth 990FX Review

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We’ve been keen on Asus’ Sabertooth line of motherboards for a while. They typically offer great performance and a healthy set of features, and represent good value for money too. In terms of hard cash, the Sabertooth 990FX gets off to a good start: it costs just £165, with the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 weighing in at just under £200.

It sports the green and black details typical of Sabertooth motherboards, with large heatpipe-linked heatsinks covering the chipset and VRMs.

The Sabertooth has a similar layout to that of the Crosshair V Formula, but the PCB is far less busy. There are six fan headers, two of which are 4-pin PWM-compatible to cater for dual-fan CPU coolers; none of these is located in the bottom half of the PCB though.

To aid cable routeing, the 8-pin EPS12V and 24-pin ATX12V connectors are located at the edge of the PCB and all eight of the SATA ports are mounted parallel to the PCB. Six of these ports are rated at 6Gbps and run from the SB950 Southbridge, while the other two run off a JMicron JMB362 controller, and are SATA 3Gbps. There are four PCI-E slots, the lowest of which has just four PCI-E lanes.

Installing graphics cards in the top two slots means that each has access to the full 16 PCI-E lanes, whereas if the top three slots are all occupied, the second and third slots are limited to eight lanes each.

As with the other 990FX chipset-equipped motherboards we've looked at, the Sabertooth supports both SLI and CrossFireX. Four USB 3 ports are included – two via the I/O panel, in addition to a USB 3 header on the PCB – and there are ten USB 2 ports.

Audio is supplied by the standard 8-channel affair using an on-board Realtek ALC892 audio codec, while the SB950 Southbridge supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. Sadly, there are no on-board power or reset switches, with only a standard CMOS jumper in the way of overclocking aids.

Testing Methods

With the exception of ATTO, which we use to measure the performance of a motherboard's SATA controllers, all of our benchmarks use real applications that give you a great idea of how well a product fares when performing the tasks for which you're likely to use it.

We test with Media Benchmarks suite, which can be downloaded so that you can test your own system. It uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-Zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we benchmark the board running Arma II, and record the minimum and average frame rates.

The benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase.

Test Setup:
Motherboards:

• Asus Sabertooth 990FX (AMD 990FX)


• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 (AMD 990FX)


• ASRock 890FX Deluxe 5 (AMD 890FX)


• MSI 990FXA-GD80 (AMD 990FX)


• Asus Crosshair V Formula (AMD 990FX)


• Asus Sabertooth 990FX (AMD 990FX)

Common Components:

• 3.3GHz AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition CPU


• 4GB 1,600MHz DDR3 CL8 memory


• Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA hard disk


• Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 3GB graphics card


• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU


• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit


• GeForce 275.33 WHQL

Overclocked Settings:

• Asus Sabertooth 990FX - 4.09GHz: 315MHz HTT x 13


• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 - 3.95GHz: 305MHz HTT x 13


• ASRock 890FX Deluxe 5 - 4.13GHz: 295MHz HTT x 14


• MSI 990FXA-GD80 - 4.2GHz: 247MHz HTT x 17


• Asus Crosshair V Formula 4.14GHz: 345MHz HTT x12


• Asus Sabertooth 990FX 4.1GHz: 315MHz HTT x13

Image Editing

Gimp

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Handbrake H.264 Encoding

We use the open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded video encoder Handbrake to encode an HD video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.

Video Encoding

Handbrake

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Media Benchmarks

Download from: bit-tech

bit-tech Team has developed his own suite of benchmarks using real-world and open-source applications to simulate how PCs are actually used. The suite comprises an image editing test using Gimp, a video encoding test using Handbrake, and a multi-tasking test using 7-Zip to archive and encrypt a large batch of files while an HD movie plays in mplayer.

A score of 1,000 means that the test system is as fast as our reference PC, which used a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 at stock speed, 2GB of Corsair 1,066MHz DDR2 memory, a 250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S hard disk and an Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP motherboard. The scoring system is linear, so a system scoring 1,200 points is 20 per cent faster than our reference system. Equally, a system scoring 1,200 is 4 per cent faster than a system scoring 1,150.

Multi-tasking Performance

Multi-tasking is a phrase with which we're all familiar, because most of us are now used to running multiple applications at the same time. However, to run multiple applications well you need a powerful (ideally multi-core) CPU and plenty of RAM.

Our multi-tasking test performs a massive file backup (with encryption) using 7-Zip, while simultaneously playing back an HD movie file using mplayer, making it a demanding test for any PC.

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Overall Score

The overall score is an unweighted mean average of the scores of the three individual tests.

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SATA Performance

Website: ATTO Disk Benchmark

Testing the SATA and performance with an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB as this is the fastest SSD we've ever tested, and it can test the maximum speed of SATA 6Gbps ports.

We use ATTO Disk Benchmark, and take the read and write speeds for 1,024KB data chunks.

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Arma II: Operation Arrowhead

Publisher: IDEA Games

We test this hugely demanding game at its most challenging settings, with all the detail options set to Very High and High anti-aliasing enabled. For the benchmark itself, we use a 60-second FRAPS run performed within our own custom time demo. As the benchmark is variable due to AI inconsistencies, tests are performed three times and the average result is used.

Gaming Performance (Stock Speed)

Arma II, 1,920 x 1,080, All settings at very high

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Gaming Performance (Overclocked)

Arma II, 1,920 x 1,080, All settings at very high

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Performance Analysis

We were keen to see how the Sabertooth performed compared with the Crosshair V Formula, and we weren’t disappointed. It recorded the second highest Gimp image editing and HandBrake H.264 video encoding scores of 1,081 and 1,064 respectively. Its overall score of 1,398 is the fastest we've seen from any AM3+ motherboard at stock speeds.

The Sabertooth was also the second fastest board in Arma II, with a minimum frame rate of 63fps, and managed some stonking SATA speeds too. The SB950 chip powered its way to a read speed of 546MB/sec and a write speed of 474MB/sec – the latter is even faster than the Crosshair V.

As we expected, the Sabertooth’s EFI was fantastic – well laid out and lag-free. We reached the maximum HTT of 350MHz in no time at all by lowering the CPU multiplier and RAM divider to their lowest settings, and using a CPU NB of 1.3V, an NB of 1.325V, and the NB HT at 1.3V and SB at 1.31V. Unfortunately, as with all the other motherboards on test, the Sabertooth wasn’t great at recovering when we pushed it a little too far, but unlike the recalcitrant ASRock 890FX Deluxe5, it just needed to be manually restarted once or twice.

Sadly, the Sabertooth wasn’t as adept at maintaining its high maximum HTT when we ramped up the CPU multiplier. We initially thought that the voltages we’d applied were too high, as the motherboard’s heatsinks were quite toasty. However, even lowering the voltages significantly didn’t allow us to use an HTT higher than 315MHz, combined with a CPU multiplier of 13x.

This resulted in a final CPU overclock of 4.095GHz – not the fastest on test, but the HTT we were able to use was the second highest, and provides plenty of CPU-to-system bandwidth. The overclock did the trick too, with the Gimp image editing test score rising by 186 points, the HandBrake H.264 video encoding test improving by 402 points and the multi-tasking test increasing by 113 points. This resulted in the fastest overall Media Benchmarks score of 1,632 – nearly 17 per cent faster than the stock-speed score. The Sabertooth also recorded the highest minimum frame rate in Arma II of 72fps – a healthy increase of 13 per cent.

Conclusion

We were pleasantly surprised by the Sabertooth 990FX’s performance, both at its stock speeds and when overclocked. It consistently held its ground against much more expensive motherboards and put others to shame with its excellent SATA performance and nippy, easy-to-use EFI. It has an excellent PCB layout and enough ports to satisfy even the most hardware-packed systems.

On-board power and reset buttons are an odd omission from what we consider to be an overclocking-orientated motherboard, especially given how poorly the latest batch of AMD motherboards seem to recover from overzealous overclocking. The competition therefore claws back some points for on-board buttons and other handy features for overclocking.

Despite this slight flaw, the Sabertooth performed similarly to more expensive boards and was much faster than its nearest competitors in some circumstances. Gigabyte’s 990FXA-UD7 and the Crosshair V Formula offer some extra lavishness in terms of overclocking, features and general pizzazz (waterblocks will be easier to buy for them too). However, the Sabertooth is a fast, well featured and competitively priced board that offers the most sensible option for anyone who wants maximum performance from an AMD system.

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