Personal Opinion

Honestly speaking I haven't been a big fan of ASUS Sabertooth motherboards. Almost always the only advantage they had over the P-Series motherboards was there camouflage design. And that was only an advantage if you like it, otherwise it's even a disadvantage. Furthermore the Sabertooth boards were also lacking that last bit of performance to really compete with the other models. And something we've also been missing were the power/reset buttons as well as a debug LED. But, and there is a big "but" meanwhile, the Sabertooth Z77 makes quite a few things better! First of all the performance is now almost on the same level as with ASUS' ROG boards and there is also a very good and attractive feature set, which I really like. Finally there is the price of this thing: for CHF 215.- (est. EUR 179.-) you can get a board which can kind of keep up with the ROG series. Sure it is no high-end overclocking motherboard with tons of features you might not even use once but meanwhile it really is a product that found it's place between the P-Series and the ROG motherboards. With it's price tag as well as feature set it targets mostly gamers or users who want to build a well performing and solid system.

I'm very curious if ASUS will add a second model to the Sabertooth series. I could imagine that at the CHF 300.- (est. EUR 250.-) price point there would still be a lot of users interested in such a board with a few more features. Something that could be interesting would be a PLX bridge chip to offer more PCI-Express lanes. On one hand there could be more USB 3.0 port then and/or there was more flexbility with the PCI-Express x16 slots.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 12 - SiSoft Sandra 1
Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery	Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 3 - Features	Page 14 - UC Bench
Page 4 - Layout	Page 15 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 16 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 17 - Games
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 18 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - 3D Mark 11	Page 19 - Performance Rating
Page 9 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 20 - Conclusion
Page 10 - 3D Mark 2001 SE	Page 21 - Personal opinion
Page 11 - PC Mark 7

Discuss this article in the forums

Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch Copy edited and translated: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch c.ney@ocaholic.ch