ASUS TUF Sabertooth 990FX R3.0 Motherboard Review

Rating: 7.5.

AMD's new AM4 platform is fresh on the market but the overall investment cost is still high with the current crop of Ryzen 7 CPUs starting at more than £300. What if you have an AMD FX-series processor that you are happy with and simply want a new motherboard with a more up-to-date feature set?

Maybe your current AM3+ motherboard is on its last legs and you simply want a drop-in replacement rather than a new processor, memory, and cooling hardware. We look at ASUS' TUF Sabertooth 990FX R3.0 to see if it's still a worthy option for AM3+ buyers.

Notable features for the ASUS TUF Sabertooth 990FX R3.0 include AURA RGB support, a PCIe-capable M.2 connector, and 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2. All three of those inclusions show the updated nature of ASUS' motherboard as none of them was available at the launch of AMD's 990FX chipset.

Focussing on the more influential factors for buyers with power-hungry FX chips, ASUS deploys an 8+2-phase VRM that is built with digital control and ‘TUF‘ components.

Features (taken from the ASUS product page):

• Aura RGB lighting – full RGB control with a variety of exciting presets for its on-board LED illumination
• Digital gunmetal-gray camouflage PCB and Q-LED indicators
• SafeSlot – Reinvented, strengthened PCIe slot utilizes a new insert-molding process for superior retention and shearing resistance.
• USB 3.1 onboard – three Type-A port plus a reversible Type-C port
• TUF Components – [TUF Alloy Chokes, TUF Caps & MOSFETs; Certified by Military-standard]

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