Asus Sabertooth X99 Review

Performance Analysis

The Asus Sabertooth X99 certainly didn't mess about in our benchmarks and was joint quickest in the video and photo editing tests as well as in Cinebench R15. It was second only to the Asus X99-Pro in Terragen 3. It was a couple of frames per second off the pace in our Bioshock Infinite game test although this is practically within the margin of error. A lot of this seemed to be due to a pretty aggressive Turbo frequency, which saw the CPU speed stick at its maximum 3.5GHz throughout our benchmarks and most of the time at idle too.

This did lead to a fairly high power draw, though, with the reading of 113W at idle a good 20-30W above some other ATX motherboards on test. However, this was still lower than several other motherboards from both Asus and ASRock. The load power consumption at stock speed was a little more in line and just over 20W higher than the lowest figure recorded by the significantly cheaper MSI X99S Plus.


The storage benchmarks were pleasing too and there were no issues to report in either the SATA 6Gbps or M.2 speeds. If anything it was the audio performance that was the most surprising. It's the best result we've seen so far from an X99 motherboard overall, just pipping the ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer to the post with some impressive numbers in the noise and Dynamic range tests. Once overclocked to 4.3GHz, the Sabertooth X99 continued to impress, with good results in our game tests, and otherwise claiming a podium place in all our other tests too.

Conclusion

If you're after an X99 system on a budget, the Asus Sabertooth X99 isn't for you. There are lots of features here that tap into future-proofing as well as providing perks you can take advantage of now. The extra gadgets demand an additional premium, but features such as USB 3.1 and NVMe support might be worth it for some. The rest of the package is fairly familiar for a Sabertooth-branded motherboard though. You get a competent overclocking motherboard, plenty of features such as thermal probes and other physical additions such as port blanking plates and plenty of things to tweak using the included software too.

We'd like to see some overclocking/testing features added to TUF motherboards, such as on-board power and reset buttons, and we still believe the Thermal Armor needs a re-think. However, the biggest issue the Sabertooth X99 has is competition from Asus's own X99 Pro and X99 Deluxe, both of which are arguably more desirable (and as such more deserving of our prestigious Premium Grade award) and include more by way of overclocking tools plus WiFi too. However, we can't deny that the Sabertooth is a great motherboard for enthusiasts; it's loaded with features with no major shortcomings and produced a great showing in our benchmarks.