Layout

The Sabertooth 990FX comes in the typcial military look ASUS provided their TUF series motherboards with. Therefore the manufacturer uses colors like olive-green, black and grey. Generally it is the goal to achieve a look that automatically suggests that this is a high quality and "tough" product. The different cooling blocks also consist of ceramic. Altogether ASUS succeeded in generating a homogenous look but one really needs to like the color scheme and we think that not everybody will enjoy the military looks.

ASUS provided their latest TUF board with a digital power design, whereas the CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets two phases. Looking at the capacitors themselves you'll find ML caps around the CPU socket. These multilayer polymer capacitors offer advantages over ceramic capacitors. Therefore super ML caps remain stable under regular as well as AC voltage, doesn't have an aging mechanism and are resilient under thermal shock.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX. Officially supported are DDR3 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz with up to 32 GByte capacity. There is plenty of space to install even big aircoolers and they shouldn't interfere with memory.

The current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The southbridge got a passive cooling block which has not been integrated into the heatpipe loop of northbridge and VRM. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.