Asus Sabertooth X58 Review

Performance Analysis

With a price of £155, the Sabertooth competes directly with the £150 Asus P6X58D-E and the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R (rev.2), which have been fighting it out for a spot on our finalised Christmas wishlist for the past few months. There’s little to separate the two older motherboards, apart from price, so we were interested to see how the Sabertooth would compare.

At stock speeds, the Sabertooth roared through our Media Benchmarks, although its scores were a little tame compared to those we saw from the two competing budget X58 boards. A score of 3,223 in the video editing part of the test was particularly poor, falling around 70 points behind the P6X58D-E and UD3R. Better performance in the other benchmarks clawed back some lost ground, and the Sabertooth finished with an overall score of 2,065, just a whisker short of the other two motherboards.

The Sabertooth was significantly quicker once it was overclocked but you wouldn’t expect any less from a board sporting a 4.4GHz Gulftown CPU. Again though it fell just short of greatness in our media benchmarks scoring only 1,639 in the multi tasking portion of the test. Having said this most of the budget boards we’ve seen don’t do greatly at this test so while its score is quite a way behind premium boards such as the Rampage III Gene and the X58A-UD7, it’s not miles behind the UD3R and P6X58D-E the Sabertooth is actually competing against.


The Sabertooth bit back in Crysis – its minimum frame rate of 37fps was streets ahead of the 31fps achieved by the two competing boards. This is the second best stock result we’ve seen, with only the gaming-optimised Asus Rampage III Gene producing a better result.

Once we’d overclocked the board things got even better for the Sabertooth in games as it jumped straight to the top of our graphs. The minimum frame rate of 45fps and average of 62fps were the quickest we’ve seen from an X58 board so far. If you’re looking to put together a gaming rig based on a LGA1366 board it doesn’t look like you can do better than the Sabertooth.

We also found the SATA performance of the Sabertooth’s ports to be better than average. Its SATA 6Gbps ports read at an average of 342MB/sec, some 35MB/sec quicker than we’ve seen from boards using the same Marvell 9128 controller. This is an excellent result and shows that it’s important to choose the right motherboard if you have a fast SSD.


Given the Sabertooth’s billing as a super-hardy board, we tried pushing the QPI back up to 220MHz and dropping the CPU multiplier to 19x. This gave us the same overall CPU frequency, but with a greater CPU throughput (although we had to drop the memory frequency from 1,600MHz to 1,323MHz). This overclock bumped up the scores even further, and its overall Media Benchmark score of 2,612 was the best we’ve seen from an X58 motherboard. Clearly, the Sabertooth has plenty more performance to give if you’re prepared to push the BIOS aggressively.

Conclusion

When the Sabertooth padded into our lab we were a little afraid that it would be a matter of style over substance. We were happy to be proved wrong, however, as the board was quick and extremely overclockable. The Sabertooth also represents excellent value for money, as it’s only fractionally more expensive than the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 2) or the Asus P6X58D-E, but has noticeably superior gaming and SATA 6Gbps performance.

The only caveat is that it was generally slower than the UD3R and the P6X58D-E in our Media Benchmarks, but the margins we’re talking about here are tiny - you’d barely notice any difference. It’s also better-looking than the older boards and is backed up by a superior warranty. If you’re looking for an X58 motherboard, your decision just became a lot easier.

• Speed
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

Score Guide