ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

In mid November we saw the launch of the enthusiast-based Sandy Bridge Extreme platform along with the X79 (code name Patsburg) chipsets and since then we have brought you reviews of the i7-3960X CPU and the Rampage IV Extreme motherboard. Today we continue our walk down the LGA2011 road and bring you another highly anticipated board from ASUS: the Sabertooth X79.


Read more here: ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard Review

[Soultribunal]

Thanks for the Excellent REview. Its for sure a interesting board, and its nice to see ASUS continue with a lot of unique design keys and features.

-ST

[Arinoth]

Wow that's quite the heatsinks they have on that motherboard, seems they really want to promote overclocking with it.

Though why are we still only seeing 2 SATA 3.0 slots on most motherboards, especially high end ones?

All in all a rather informative and great review, definitely an overclocker's board to have for x79.

[Eldonko]

Thx :)

As far as I know the chipset supports up to 6 SATA 6Gb/s but you are right most boards Ive seen have 2 ports. For this board they added the Marvell controller to run ASUS SSD caching so perhaps there wasnt space for more. Hard to say.

[Eldonko]

Actually now that I think about it the final version of X79 has 2 SATA 6Gb/s instead of 6. That was one of the things that Intel cut at the last minute. They said the SAS RAID controller had unreliable performance so dropped it to 2.

[Arinoth]

Ah thanks for that, it's been something that's been bugging me for a while on high end boards.

[Eldonko]

Yeah I had totally forgotten about that. Have to update the chipset section.

Supposedly there will be a new patsburg revision at some point that Intel said will allow 4 SATA 3 ports but they dont guarantee performance or data integrity so mb manufactures have to make the call whether to include the extra ports or not. I wouldnt hold my breath waiting for those extra 2 ports..

[stoanee]

Added to my wish list..............

[Soultribunal]

I think a board like this would actually be really good in testing Cases. Given the amount of polling points for Temp (thanks to thermal radar) you have a better picture of a case's airflow dynamics.
Might be something I'll consider in the future when I have the coin to do X79.

-ST

[Appat]

Thanks for the great review !!
There is a very small typo in the first picture of the 6th page ( A Closer Look at the Sabertooth X79),
We should read "DDR3 slots channels C and D" instead of "B and C" ....