Asus Sabertooth X99 Review

Overclocking

There's a lot to be said for Asus's EFIs and the Sabertooth X99 is no exception. There are a lot of settings here, most of which will be overkill for your average overclocker, but despite this the EFI is still easy to deal with.

Anything above 4.2GHz is good for our Core i7-5960X and it flew straight into this frequency with a vcore of 1.28V. However, 4.3GHz needed a fair bit more voltage for 100 percent stability, settling on a figure of 1.32V plus a System Agent voltage of 0.95V.

Despite this extra voltage, the CPU remained in the limits of our all-in-one liquid cooler, but to get any further you'll likely need decent custom water-cooling.

EFI

The EFI is pretty straightforward and includes all the settings you'll need for overclocks on air and water. There's a big focus on cooling and you're presented with the QFan Control even on the simple landing page. Delving into advanced mode makes things look a little more familiar, and here you can tweak the fan profile curves of all of the onboard fan headers, including the tiny VRM fan.

There are fewer features compared to ROG boards and this is something we feel Asus needs to address. SSD secure erase, for example, would be useful on all motherboards, allowing you to give your SSD that new feeling every time you reinstall Windows - little things like this you'd expect on a £300 motherboard, whether it's ROG-branded or not.

That said, the EFI in general is otherwise as well-featured and slick as both ROG and MSI motherboards and a little clearer than Gigabyte's recent efforts too.








Head over the page to see the Performance Analysis, Conclusion and Scores.