Asus Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1 Review

Performance Analysis

The PCMark 8 tests tend to rely on things other than raw CPU grunt and here the Sabertooth wasn't particularly fast, albeit just three seconds off the pace of the fastest result in the video encoding test and one second in the photo editing test. It was mid-table in the game tests while in the rendering tests it was much more potent at stock speed, yet it still managed some of the lower power consumption figures.


Once overclocked to 4.8GHz, the situation improved markedly, with a second place result in Unigine Valley and decent numbers elsewhere too. The overclock only saw 3W added to the idle power draw and while the load number increased from 124W to 180W, this is still far from the highest overclocked load power draw we've seen.

The storage and audio tests were very encouraging. It managed the best M.2 speeds we've seen so far, outdoing the next best board by 12MB/sec on the read speed. This at least shows that for short load periods, the heat inside the M.2 chamber wasn't enough to throttle the SSD, but as we mentioned earlier, if you'll be putting heavy load on an M.2 SSD, you may want to consider using the included PCI-E adaptor instead to be on the safe side. There was also nothing bad to report about the SATA 6Gbps speeds, except of course to avoid the ASMedia controller ports (these are the beige ones) if you're connecting a modern SSD - they're limited to less than 400MB/s so you'll be losing out if you hook up something that's capable of over 500MB/sec.


Audio performance in RightMark was excellent, although we've come to expect similar results from Z170 boards now. With Z97, a result that was greater than 100dBA on dynamic range and lower than -100dBA on noise level was rare but most boards can do this now. As such, the Sabertooth doesn't really offer anything stand-out here, and only the Maximus VIII Impact managed a noticeably better result using normal testing methods, while the discrete Asus Xonar DGX 5.1 was slightly inferior to the Sabertooth.

Conclusion

We've heard plenty of good things about Asus's TUF range of motherboards and our own experience of using them in our test rigs over the years has been similar too - they just go on and on. We can't say that for sure about the Z170 Sabertooth as it's only been in our lab for a matter of days of course. As for value, well, £200 is at the upper end of mainstream Z170 motherboards for Intel's new Skylake CPUs, but the Sabertooth does offer a number of features to make this price worth paying. You get a 5-year warranty as standard - two more years than most regular boards, two M.2 ports, albeit one via a PCI-E adaptor, loads of aesthetic gubbins such as the port blanking set and good VRM cooling courtesy of extra cooling fans, although these can be noisy if you don't fine tune them in the EFI. Similarly, we feel the armour could do with reigning in a bit - it's got to the point that installing some coolers and cables is actually being hampered, although not massively so.


We actually think it's a great-looking board too and it has masses of fan headers, SATA ports, USB 3 Type-A and Type-C ports and enough PCI-E slots for the busiest of systems. It's not on par with some of the high-end ROG boards in terms of features, but the Sabertooth is aimed towards a different crowd. The tweaking on offer in terms of noise and cooling is second to none as far as motherboards go and the Thermal Radar 2 software works well and can control an entire case load of fans. Anyone interested in fine-tuning their PC will love it. Of course, you also have the option of using an automatic fan controller such as Lamptron's CW611 and a cheaper motherboard, but thankfully the Sabertooth does offer a lot more besides.