ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R3.0 Review
Published by Luca Rocchi on 05.12.16Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| At a first glance the 990FX Sabertooth R3.0 leaves a good impression. You get a reasonable feature mixn yet the price is a bit steep in our opinion. There is a decent power design but onboard overclocking features are absent. In terms of storage connectivity there are five angled SATA connectors, an M.2 slot and a good number of USB 3.1 ports, which make this board compatible with a vast variety of storage devices. In case of the color scheme we find the classic Sabertooth design. Despite the name, this board doesn't feature the well-known TUF Armor. | -
Design - Layout - Features - M.2 Slot |
- TUF Thermal Armor - Price |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS's Layout is well thought. Once more very practical are the angled SATA connectors, of which there are five. Unfortunately there are no power and reset buttons and there is also no CLR-CMOS button. We want to underline that this board features good storage versatility, since there is SATA as well as M.2 support. Furthermore the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots is well thought an therefore nothing needs to be criticized at this point. Should you decide to build an SLI/CrossFire setup, then the first card will still be able to get plenty of fresh air. 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 particular board ASUS also offers their so called AURA header, which allows you to wire RGB-LED strips directly to the motherboard to then be controlled from within Windows. | - Space around the CPU socket - AURA | - No power/reset-button onboard - No Debug LED | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 2D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks 2nd. When taking the average of all 3D results this board manages to score again the same 3rd place. Overall performance is competitive. Having a look at power consumption we see that this board is also perfectly in line. | - Power consumption | - Power Consumption |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASUS has put a lot of time and effort into making their BIOS look nicer and more user friendly. Especially when we compare this version of ASUS BIOS to the first UEFI BIOS from ASUS, it simply cannot be compared, since the two are worlds apart. What's almost self-explanatory is that you get a lot of tuning and tweaking options in order to optimize the system towards your needs. We also like the entry screen which displays a lot of useful information. Apart from that overclocking our test CPU to 5.0 GHz was straight forward and there were no issues whatsoever. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| These days you can get the ASUS 990FX Sabertooth R3.0 for about 188 Euros and for that price you get a motherboard with a decent feautre mix. Neverthless the price is pretty steep and the simple fact, that compared to it's predecessor it's only a small upgrade doesn't make it worth the money. | - Gaming - Overclocking - Enthusiasts |
- Price | |
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS 990FX Sabertooth R3.0 good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 Review |
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