ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark S Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 24.02.15Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| As expected the ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark S is a well-built motherboard 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 S costs whopping 258 Euro, which is quite a lot extra for the white paintjob. Basically this is the same motherboard like the 215 Euro Sabertooth Z97 Mark 2. Apart from pricing we 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 |
- Price | |
| Layout | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark S'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 | ||
| 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 also include values from all Z87 motherboards we've tested in the past. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board is achieving a position in the top half. The performance of this board could really be better and we're hoping ASUS's BIOS team will have another look at the BIOS putting a focus on performance improvements. On another note we had a closer look at power consumption and this isn't one of the most energy efficient motherboards we've had for testing so far. Since there are quite a few features, or in other words additional chips, power consumption is a bit higher then with other motherboards. | - SiSoft Sandra Arithmetic |
- 3DMark S1 - 3DMark FireStrike - PCMark 07 - SiSoft Sandra Multimedia - SiSoft Sandra Cryptography - Wprime 1024m - SiSoft Sandra Memory Latency - SuperPi 32m - Metro Last Night low details |
|
| Overclocking / 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 - Clear arrangement |
||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| These days you can get the Sabertooth Z97 Mark S for 258 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. This board is anything but cheap but for the extra you're paying you get the most beautiful motherboard money can buy these days. | - Enthusiast - Gaming - Modding |
- Price | |
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark S good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Z97-Pro WiFi AC Review |
Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H Black Edition Review
 |
|
|