The TUF (The Ultimate Force) series have always been very distinghuisable from the other ASUS boards. With their semi military brown/green colour scheme, you can recognise them in a flash. With the P67 Socket 1155 version, ASUS had introduced the Thermal vest, covering the entire motherboard. Allowing improved air circulation over all of the critical parts, if you installed an optional fan. On the X79 version we see a trimmed down version of the Thermal vest, baptised Thermal Armor. Comprising out of thwo parts, with the first part located on the left upper part of the motherboard. With the possibility to install a little 5cm fan (included) for some extra airflow over the PWM heatsink. On the X79 chipset we see a a heatsink with a duct and preinstalled fan. These fans can't be fully shut off, though can be speed adjusted via the bios.

 

 

 

As you can see from the board shot there's more than enough clearance between the upper two PCI-E 16X slots for smooth sailing SLI/Crossfire operation. Supporting 8 dimm slots supporting up to 64Gb of RAM. Alert readers will also directly notice that there's no heatpipe, connecting the PWM heatsink with the bottom X79 chipset heatsink.

 

   

 

Talking about the PWMs, we encounter miltary class certified components for enhanced durability and reliability. Every part get's the TUF treatment ; so we end up with TUF chokes, TUF capacitors, TUF Ferrite inductors. All the previous parts are certified by 3rd party military grading. The entire TUF engine power design features 8 +2 +2 +2 digital phases. ASUS uses their DIGI+ Power Control on their X79 boards, comprising of three digital voltage controller, DRAM controllers for precise voltage control. These setting can all be fine tuned via either the bios or the included AI suite software, but more on the latter later.

 

 

 

Storage wise we already knew that Intel didn't quite deliver with the X79 chipset. The chipset itself only supports up to 4 S-ATA 3GBs and only two S-ATA 6Gbs. The black ports are the 3GB/s ones, the brown ones the 6Gb/s ports steered by the X79 chipset. Raid version 0, 1, 5 and 10 are supported. The two white ports on the left are controlled by a Marvell chip (9128) and also operating at 6GB/s. Nice feature that ASUS developped their own SSD caching software. Take note that to use this feature you have to install in RAID mode. An ASMedia (1061) chip is in control of a Power eSATA 6GB/s green port and another red eSATA6GB/s on the I/O panel.

 

   

 

Besides the two previously mentioned eSATA ports, we find an abundance of USB ports on the I/O panel : 6 USB2.0 (black ones) and 4 USB3.0 (blue ones) to be correct. Yes, still a PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port, Firewire 1394a, optical S/PDIF out/ A total of 6 audio jacks and just next to the powered red eSATA port, an USB BIOS flash back function key. Just plug in your USB stick with the required bios into the white USB port, press the button and the board "should" flash the bios. A really nice feature to roll back to a working bios.

 

A closer look at the Thermal Armor solution. Either one 5cm fan, called Turbo Engine Fan, on the X79 chipset heatsink and passive cooling for the PWM heatsink solution. This fan will keep the chipset cooler, especially when using dual GPU solutions. To further aid heat dissipation off the MOSFET area,  you can opt to mount the included 2nd Turbo Engine Fan.

 

 

 

The prints on both of the heatsink solutions confirm good conductive contact.

 

 

The entire cooling solution is mounted securely by spring supprted screws. No fragile plastic pins on this ASUS board.

 

 

On the picture on the right you spot ASUS's MemOk! button. Very handy if you pushed the RAM too far. Just press this button and the MemOK! feature will detect failsafe settings for the used memory. It will boot your system in no time. Too bad it's positioned a bit awkward just above the 24 pin power connector. Talking about press buttons, it would have been handy if we had Power and Reset buttons mister ASUS.

 

  

 

Like mentioned before, USB support is massive on the Sabretooth. 14 x USB2.0 via the X79 chipset. These are divided over 6 black ones on the IO back panel and 4 connectors at the bottom of the board. Up to 6 x USB3.0 via the ASMedia controller, with 4 blue ports on the IO panel and two via the onboard green connector near the 24 pin power connector. Only one removable bios chip on the Sabretooth, but with the Flash Back option you got an extra safety net.

 

Quick overview of the board and it's main features :

 

 

 

Most interesting part of the bios is ofcourse the AI Tweaker tab. If overclocking is ya game, this is the place to be. ASUS bios engineers created a fast and very user friendly bios. From all the X79 boards I'm testing my preference goes out to the ASUS version, it's miles in front of the competition.

 

 

The amount of adjustable voltages on X79 are too much too handle. Luckily for air overclocks we only need to adjust Vcore, VCSSA and CPU VTT voltage.

 

 

And it's not over yet... loadline settings galore...

 

And for the ram tweakers, there are again more options to drool over...

 

 

A pretty extensive list of BIOS option. The high end board from ASUS, the Rampage IV, even has more option to fiddle with...

The first page of bios screens might have scared the faint hearted, but luckily the included algorythms are pretty versatile and most setings can be left on auto. However let's continue with the CPU tab. If you own the 3930K or 3960X boosting performance is easy. Just up the cpu multiplier, adjust Vcore and if needed adjust the loadline setting and you are good to go. With the ASUS boards you have to leave the Turbo feature on when overclocking. Most SB-E CPU's we have tested will do at least 4500mhz at 1.35Vcore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even though I'm no big fan of software OCing, it can be helpfull to tweak the little extra when testing stuff in Windows. The AI suite of the X58 boards seemed to be problematic sometimes. When setting voltages, all of the sudden the VCore was jumping all over the place. With X79, the new AI Suite seems rock solid. Plus it covers most of the essential settings from multipliers, Bclock, to loadlines and PWM frequency. Top job ASUS !

 

 

 

Even though the basic AI Suite has a monitoring tab for voltages and temp readouts, the Sabretooth software version is extended with the Thermal Radar function. Twelve readout points for temperature, some in critical areas like near the MOSFETs. Other readouts are  a bit more of a bling bling factor, but they allow to monitor the temps all over the board. No options are left open.

 

 

The picture on the right, is when we pushed the 4500mhz OC'ed i7 3960X during a 5 min Prime 95. The Vcore probe get's pretty hot, easily over 90°C after extended priming.

Time to give the Sabretooth a run for it's money. Since ASUS implemented again, alike with P67, their own version of the Turbo function, with all cores running at the same speed when being loaded. To give all boards a fair shot we will test the Sabretooth, and other X79 boards in the future, at 4500mhz.

The Sabretooth has to go head to head with Intel's own "Siler board", the DX79SI and an early test version of MSI's GD65 8D. Plus we just added the Gigabyte X79 UD5 board. It has to be noted that the biosses of the MSI and Gigabyte board were still far from stable when being overclocked, this at the time of writing. So keep the results in mind, but not as a 100% reference...

EDIT : MSI has just released a bios that should eliminate the 12X bug when pushing hard. So we will have to retest them results. Same for Gigabyte wich have resolved some issues with F9b bios.

 

• ASUS Sabretooth (0906 bios)
• Intel Siler DX79SI (0424 bios)
• Gigabyte X79 UD5 (F9a bios)
• MSI GD65 8D ( 1.2 bios )
• Intel i7 3960X CPU @ 4500mhz
• Corsair H100 Cooling
• GSkill 16Gb 2133Mhz C9 kit
• ASUS GTX480 ( SLI ) 285.38 drivers
• Western Digital 1Tb Caviar green HDD
• Corsair 850TX PSU

Here are some shots of the Sabretooth, UD5 and Siler board in SLI configuration.

 

 

Let's give our usual test suite a spin :

Stareting off with Superpi 1M for the single threaded tests. Bandwith efficiency plays a big part for SuperPI 32M, SuperPi 1M is more alike Wprime 32. Both are more about raw CPU power.

 

 

We see all the boards neck to neck. Very close race here, not really surprising as this is pretty comon when comparing similar specced motherboards. Both tests are also very brief, let's see what happens when we run the extended versions...

 

 

 

Wprime is again a very close race, all about CPU speed, ram speed and timings hardly play a part. Though when we look at SuperPi 32M we notice the ASUS board pulling away. Not by much, but a solid 3 sec gain over the Intel Siler board is pretty good in my book. Let's see if we can explain the above result with the AIDA 64 bandwith test.

 

 

The Sabretooth board having the best READ and COPY result. I have to admit that we only adjust the main timings to 9-11-10-27 1T and set TRFC to 120. All the other timings were left on AUTO. Debatable test method maybe, but the board's bios has to take some sort of responsability for the subtimings. Y-cruncher, a SuperPi multithreaded variant shows all boards in a more closer race. The MSI GD65 8D just snatching the win. For your info : all results are the average out of three runs.

 

 

 

The Sabretooth grabbing a solid 2nd spot in Cinebench Release 10. The Intel board finishes dead last, however the difference between the tested boards is really minimal.

 

 

The newer version of Cinebench, release 11 obtains the best CPU result on the Sabretooth board. The OpenGL test is in advantage of the GD65 board.

 

 

Deep Chess Fritz's, a build in benchmark, runs on all cores and gives a continous steady output. The ASUS Sabretooth not being able to claim the win, lacking just a few points.

 

Last but not least a quick encoding test by X264HD version 2.0. All boards pretty tied again, only the Siler board is a bit lagging behind.

 

3D action now. Starting off with Futuremarks synthetic 3DVantage. The Phsyx test is done by the CPU, not the default AUTO setting of older versions of 3Dmark Vantage. So plz when comparing these scores with your Nvidia equipped GPU setup, plz check the PysX setting first.

 

 

The Sabretooth finishing in the middle of the pack. CPU score is right in front, GPU score is okayish :) The UD5 board scored marvelously well in my Vantage runs.

 

 

The Futuremark 3DMark11 is in favour of the Sabretooth board. Being the only board that surpassed 600O points total score. Like we saw in the SuperPi 32M test, the ram plays a role in 3Dmark11. Now let's add a 2nd GTX 480 GPU, for some SLI action.

 

 

The 2nd GTX 480 acted up on the Intel Siler board. Maybe it was due to the extra heat build up of the 2nd GPU as the Siler board's PCI-E 16X slots have close to no spacing. The X79 Sabretooth board has got adequately spaced PCI-E slots. For your info both of our GTX480's were voltmodded and OCP modded for LN2 runs. The ASUS board on top this time, both in the CPU and GPU scores.

 

 

The 3DMark 11 SLI results, show similarities with the single card runs. A better Physx score ( probably aided by the extra memory bandwith ), a better CPU and GPU score. All contribute to the win of the X79 Sabretooth. Let's drop the synthetic stuff and test some real game action at 1920 x 1080 HD resolution.

 

 

Mafia II, shows similar scores accross the boards. Not much to see here. The one FPS difference between the best and worst performer can be considered negligable. The output files of the F1 2011 benchmark in fact give identical FPS for all boards.

 

 

Dirt 3, another close finish, all test results well within the margin of error. Seems that for gaming the motherboards are neck to neck.

 

 

Battlefield 3 was run at the default High preset for the single card test and run at the Ultra setting for the dual GPU runs. It's close, so darn close...

 

As mentioned in the introduction we had the board almost close to day one from it's release. While there were initial bios hickups ( eg 125 Bclock divider not working at start, 2400mhz ram divider far from stable,...) ASUS bios team get most bugs, shortcomings quicly ironed out. Without exagerating, the ASUS lineup was pretty solid from the start. Some other brands are still limping behind, especially in the OC department. We tested our Intel 3960X ES CPU easily at it's max frequency of +5300Mhz under Liquid Nitrogen. We ran dual and triple GPU GTX 580 setups on the Sabretooth. Even with an LN2 cooled GPU the board remained a pleasure to work with. Here are some snippits of the obtained results with our Sabretooth sample.

 

 

 

Also with the i7 3820 CPU, 4750Mhz on air, is a no brainer on this board. We will push that particular CPU in the future. Keep you posted for some more results.

 

 

 

 

Since the board was pretty mature from the start we also opted to further test SSDs and RAM on this board. Pushing our GSKill RipjawsZ 16Gb Quad Channel 2133C9 kit easily to 2400Mhz and beyond. And it has more headroom, but the CPU's Integrated Memory Controller is the weakest link.

 

 

 

The intuitive layout of the Turbo Evo software, allows for quick and succesfull on the fly tweaking in Windows. And if you don't like manual tweaking, just enable the OC tuner in the bios and get this result with eg the 3960X CPU :

 

 

Nice safe OC on the CPU and the rams have been pushed to 2000Mhz too :)

 

Besides the Intel Siler reference X79 board, the Sabretooth was the first motherboard of a different manufacturer that ended up on the Madshrimps table. The first liquid nitrogen tests were also conducted on the Sabretoot, without any hickups. From the start the initial UEFI biosses had very few issues. Yes you read correct, not even the ASUS boards are perfect.  But as time evolved and we got the privilege to test more and more boards for debugging/reviewing. We found out the initial release ASUS bios was already lightyears ahead of the competition. And this my dear reader has been a vital point when using or abusing a motherboard. No matter how good your PWM design is, no matter how military class your components are, if the bios is no good, then the board will be crippled in it's usage. This paragraph is not dedicated to ASUS fanboyism. The implemented bios is just do darn good and really user friendly.

 

Our Sabretooth is still rocking hard after months of abuse.

 

Secondly the included AI suite software, is also very practical in usage. The most important bios options are represented and best off all is, that it works as it should. It's eg very easy to fine tune your voltage settings in a matter of a few clicks. The AI suite is again another big plus for any ASUS X79 board out there. The Thermal Radar, exclusively for Sabretooth versions, is a nice feature for monitoring various temp sensitive areas accross your motherboard.

But back to the board itself now. The X79 Sabretooth is a rock solid board. From day one it has been subdued to high speed CPU tests (+5.3Ghz) And this during hours of benching under extreme cold. Also has it served for SSD and RAM testing, and time after time it comes out fine. If the system is pushed too far, the overclock failed recovery does it job. No endless boot loops for this motherboard. For those that seek an easy no brainer overclock, the Sabretooth's OC Tuner pushed the 3960X ES CPU to a nice 4.3Ghz. Better than any current speed set by any other X79 tested board. On top of that, the OC Tuner also pushed the rams, where other brands just leave the rams at eg 1600mhz. Well done ASUS bios engineers !

The layout of the board for multi GPU solutions is also ideal. The Intel "Siler" board eg has got no extra space between the two PCI-E 16X slots. In fact the Sabretooth version has got a lot going for it. Excellent build quality, a very good and intuitive bios and the nice software bundle, tops it all off. Only drawback I can think off is the surprisingly high price of around 300 euros for this Sabretooth board. With the X58 and P67 version, they always retailed in the middle of the lineup. Now it is one of the more expensive boards in the ASUS S2011 range. Gamers will feel more attracted by the slightly more expensive ROG Rampage Formula board (320 euro). Plus they get a free copy of Battlefield 3 in the ROG box. If the Sabretooth retailed 30-40 euros less it would sell like hot patatoes. However it's a splended designed board, that delivers the goods and is up to any task you throw at it ! The extra extended warranty of 5 years, means ASUS is pretty confident about the hardware parts being used on this particular X79 board. This Sabretooth is a real nice addition to the existing TUF lineup ! I'm already looking forward to the Z77 version :)

The X79 Sabretooth really deserves the Madshrimps Performance award ! The novelty award accredited by the used durable aka TUF parts, the listed features and the 5 years of support warranted by ASUS.

 

 

 

 

 

PROS :

• Excellent build quality
• Very intuitive and solid bios
• Good spacing between 16X PCI-E slots
• Stable 4.3Ghz OC via OC tuner
• 5 year warranty iso 3 years
• it's TUF, TUF , TUF,...

 

CONS :

• Price is a bit too steep
• No start/reset buttons

 

Big thanks goes out to Rogier and Milan from Asus for the Sabretooth X79 sample

 

 

And to Mia from Gskill for the RipjawsZ 2133 16Gb quad channel kit.