Review: ASUS Sabertooth X79
Published by Marc Büchel on 17.11.11Fazit
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| The Sabertooth X79 generally is an interesting board. In combination with a down-draft CPU cooler this motherboard will be cooled very efficiently. This will, as a consequence, extend the components lifespan. With the "Thermal Radar" the Sabertooth X79 offers good possibilities to control the temperatures and airflow in your case. Using the corresponding software one can control the fans connected to the board and therefore realize highly efficient cooling. | - Design - Cooling concept |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Generally the ASUS Sabertooth X79s layout is well thought. Once more very practical are the angled SATA connectors. Unfortunately there are no practical power/reset buttons onboard and also for a debug LED you'd be looking in vain. Unfortunately the last expansion slots is a PCI-Express x16 slot, which means that if you choose to install a dual slots graphics card at this place you're going to cover the connectors at the bottom edge of the board. On the other hand there are two slots between the PCIe-x16 slots which means that an SLI or CrossFire setup will get a perfect environment when it comes to cooling. What absolutely cannot understand is why ASUS decided to put an active cooler on the southbridge. Today it really is possible to realize a passive cooling chipset cooling using a sophisticated heatpipe solution. |
- Angled SATA connectors - Two slots between first two PCIe-x16 slots |
- No Power/Reset-Button onboard - NoDebug display - PCI-Express x16 as last slot - Active chipset cooling |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Overall this board is a solid performer and in our comparison tables it's capable of coming in third. Not a bad result, especially if you consider, that the Sabertooth motherboards always were a bit slower than the competition. Taking a closer look at the benchmarks shows that there is no benchmark where this board is especially good or bad. In a lot of benchmarks it comes in third or fourth. | |||
| Power Consumption | + | - | |
| When it comes to power consumption, one can see the downside numerous features have. All the additional chips drain a lot of power. Compared to the Intel DX79SI, which we marked as reference board, the Sabertooth X79 needs 20 percent more power in idle mode and 15 percent more under load. These are impressive numbers. In the end the additional 25 Watts all the features need will be visible on the electricity bill at the end of the year. | - Power hungry features | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you want to buy a board with a camouflage look that also scores with an awful lot of features, then the Sabertooth X79 might be very likely the motherboard of you choice. | -
Enthusiasts - Gamer |
- Silent System | |
| Rating | |||
| We give the Sabertooth X79 sufficient four out of five stars. | |||
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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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