Asus Z87 Sabertooth Motherboard Review (w/ Intel i7 4770k)

Just before the reviews went live, G.Skill sent us over a 16GB kit of their 2,933mhz memory for Haswell testing. We therefore wanted to add a little section close to the end of this review to ascertain Z87 Sabertooth memory performance when pushed past 2,400mhz and even 2,666mhz – the previous standards for ultra high performance memory.

We will be reviewing this memory in a standalone review at later date.

The G.Skill kit arrives in a large brown box, with a dedicated fan cooling system included. There was a phase when every memory manufacturer was including these as standard, but they seem to have lost popularity.

The G.Skill Trident X 2,933mhz memory is very attractively design, featuring red and black heatspreaders.

The Trident X 2933mhz memory is set at 12-14-14-35 timings @ 1.65 volts. According to the sticker, it is ‘Intel XMP ready'.

We loaded the XMP profile in the Asus Z87 Sabertooth bios, and it seemed to load fine as shown above. with 12-14-14-35-2N timings. It would only post at 2,400mhz however, so we needed to get creative.

We loaded the XMP profile and backed down the 4770k overclock to a multipler of x37 on each core. We then increased the BCLK frequency to 122mhz. This pushed the memory to 2,928mhz while increasing the Core i7 4770k speed back to around 4,500mhz.

CPU Validation is available here. (multiplier shows x25 but memory speed is correct).

It seems there are still some problems getting the XMP profile to correctly load 2933mhz speeds, but with a little tweaking, getting to the same clock speeds manually is straightforward enough.

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