ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1 Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 13.06.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| As expected the ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1 is a well-built motherobard that comes with a complete feature armada. Like with all Sabertooth motherboards the Z97 model also received the thermal shield. Other than that there is a very decent power design next to other high quality components. These days the Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1 costs 190 Euro, which is quite an attractive price tag for this motherboard. We also want to underline, that there is a SATA Express connector, which is a nice addition to the feature list, but unfortunately there is no M.2 slot, which would have loved to find on this board. | -
Design - Connectors - SATA-Express |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1's Layout is well thought. Once more very practical are the angled SATA connectors, of which there are six. Furthermore the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots is well thought an therefore nothing needs to be criticized at this point. There are for example two slots between the first and the second PCI-Express x16 slot. Another thing that is good with this board is the fact, that there as plenty of space between the CPU socket and the heatsinks on the power design as well as between the CPU socket and the DIMM slots. With this board you also get beefed-up audio, meaning the audio circuitry has been cut from the rest of the motherboard to achieve cleaner signal processing with less unwanted noise. The Sabertooth boards in general offer quite a lot of flexibility regarding cooling thanks to thermal shield and thermal armor, which quite a few users out there like. In our opinion it's not really a necessary feature, since the onboard components don't overheat anyway. | - Angled SATA connectors - Space around the CPU socket | - No M.2 slot | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the bottom quarter of our comparison tables, which include values from all Z87 motherboards we've tested too. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board is achieving a position in the bottom half. The performance of this board could really be a little bit better and we're hoping ASUS BIOS team will have another look at the BIOS putting a focus on performance improvements. On another note, we had a look at power consumption and noticed that this isn't one of the most efficient motherboards we've had for testing so far when it comes to idle as well as load power consumption. In both cases this board ranks in the bottom third of our comparison tables. | - 3DMark FireStrike | ||
| BIOS | + | - | |
| As you might have expected from ASUS you get an excellent BIOS which offers not only a boatload of tuning and tweaking options but is also very easy to use. Especially with the entry screen ASUS is trying and also succeeding to add elements which make the BIOS much easier to use also for unexperienced users. For example the feature that the boot order can be changed by drag'n'drop is a neat addition. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| These days you can get the Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1 for 190 Euro and for that price you get a motherboard with a lot of features. The only thing that's missing is the M.2 slot, which should definitely be part of any Z97 board. Other than that you get the nice Sabertooth design which makes it perfectly suitable for modding. | - Gaming - Modding |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Z97 Sabertooth Mark 1 very good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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