Asus Sabertooth Z77 Motherboard Review (with OC GTX680)

1. Introduction2. Asus Sabretooth Z77 Motherboard3. Asus Sabretooth Z77 Motherboard (Super High Res Gallery)4. Bios and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201112. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: HandBrake 9.517. Gaming: F1 201118. Gaming: Far Cry 219. Gaming: Alan Wake20. Gaming: Battlefield 321. Gaming: Total War Shogun 222. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

The Sabertooth Z77 motherboard arrives in a dramatically designed board, which is very eyecatching.

The box is a gatefold design and opens up to reveal a list of key selling points arranged vertically. ‘Thermal Armor', ‘Thermal Radar' and ‘Dust Defender' are mentioned and we will discuss each, shortly.

The bundle we received included an early driver disc, before the retail version reaches retailers. ASUS include SATA cables (2xSATA 6 and 2xSATA 3), SLI cable, an I/O backplate, well written user manual, several accessory fans, slot ‘dust' covers (for memory and PCI slots). They also include screws, ‘dust covers' and an adhesive sponge for a 35mm fan.

The Asus Sabertooth Z77 motherboard ships with a protective cover which is called ‘Thermal Armor'. Above, we highlight pictures with this cover both on, and off. The board uses ‘Military standard' TUF Components. More companies, such as MSI are promoting ‘Military grade' components in their literature.

It covers the entire motherboard and can incorporate fans (included) for enhanced airflow and cooling. Asus claim that the PCB convection holes provide underside circulation for even greater heat mitigation, denying temperatures room to build up.

There are several areas on this ‘Thermal Armor' which can be removed and fans attached. ASUS supply two small fans for mounting areas. Above you can see a cover removed, just above the first PCIE slot.

Asus claim to be using a system called ‘Thermal Radar' which is a temperature monitoring algorithm analysing parts of the board for excessive heat. The fans will then kick in, lowering temperatures for improved system stability. ‘Fan Overtime' keeps the fans working in critical minutes after shutdown to extend component lifespan. They say that temperatures drop by 7c in just ten minutes after the computer is turned off. ‘New Fan Off' is a switch that disables fans if temperatures drop below a manually or automatically configured level.

I am not a big fan of small fans as they can generate a lot of noise. These fans aren't too loud, but they can add noise to the overall system build. We didn't use them during the review at all. Even when overclocking just shy of 5 GHZ.

When we move past all these new ‘buzzwords' that ASUS are determined to implement, we can see that the board is actually well designed and follows a subdued cream and brown colour scheme which looks great. They are using black heatsinks close to the CPU socket to help cool the VRM's.

Above, some images of the Z77 motherboard with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 installed. This is one of my favourite coolers for review systems as it can handle relatively high overclocks and is a pinch to ‘speed install' in less than a minute. The bonus is that it only costs £20 from Amazon. We found that the plastic fan shroud on the cooler was very close to the armor shell on the board, but it did fit.

The board includes 4 DIMM slots, coloured dark brown and cream to indicate Channel A and Channel B. The Sabertooth Z77 is a dual channel board and can support up to 32GB of system memory at 1066mhz/1333mhz/1600mhz/1866mhz speeds. This has to be unbuffered, non ECC DDR3 memory. It has full support for Intel's Extreme Memory Profile (XMP). Asus include the excellent ‘MEM OK' button on the board to ensure it will post, overriding potential memory timing issues.

There are eight SATA connectors on the board. The white connectors on the left (picture above) are controlled by the ASMedia chip and are rated to 6Gb/s. The four black connectors in the middle are controlled by the Intel Z77 chipset and are rated to 3 Gb/s. The two brown SATA ports on the far right are also controlled by the Z77 chipset, however they are rated to 6Gb/s. The green connector beside these is the USB 3.0 header for front panel I/O.

Along the bottom of the board are three USB headers, next to some well positioned 4 pin fan headers (ideal for case fans on the side panel). The system panel connector is placed bottom right of the board.

The Sabertooth Z77 has two PCI Express 3.0 capable slots which operate at x16 or x8/x8 depending on the configuration. There is also a single PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot at the bottom and three PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots. The PCIe 2.0 x16 slot shares bandwidth with PCIe 2.0 x1_1 slot, PCIe 2.0 x1_2 slot and PCIe 2.0 x1_3 slot.

The back I/O panel supports:

• 1x DisplayPort
• 1x HDMI Port
• 1x Optical S/PDIF Output
• 1x USB BIOS Flashback Button
• 2x eSATA 6Gb/s ports
• 1x LAN (RJ-45) port
• 4 x USB 3.0/2,0 ports (blue, 1 supports USB BIOS Flashback)
• 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
• 8 channel audio I/O ports.

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