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

The Asus Z87 Sabertooth is a killer motherboard which proved very stable throughout the last week of extensive stress testing, delivering excellent all round performance results.

The Thermal Armor has proven popular with a select audience of enthusiast users, ensuring the board gets plenty of cooling under high load situations. The optional fans are supplied if you want to push voltages to the limit, although we found that we didn't need to use them ourselves during regular overclocking.

We do love the Asus BIOS configurations. They haven't changed their layout style dramatically since the last generation, meaning long term users will feel immediately at home when navigating. If you read our other review today on the GA-Z87X-OC you will already have seen the dramatic changes that Gigabyte have implemented for the Haswell platform, a long overdue move ahead for them.

ASUS didn't really need such a dramatic change and veterans of their BIOS layouts will feel immediately at home. Most of the settings follow similar guidelines to the BIOS they implemented with Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge products.

Overclocking the ASUS board is straightforward, and we had no problems running with a 2,400mhz XMP profile on the Corsair memory, and pushing new ultra high performance G.Skill Trident X memory to around 3,000mhz. There are plenty of voltage and power delivery options to negate DROOP concerns, most of which are found in the DIGI+ Power Control panel.

The CPU Load-Line Calibration menu works very well and ensures stability can be meet at higher clock speed under load. When combined with the Power Phase Control and Power Duty Control settings, there is every possibility of getting high, stable overclocks.

Both USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps performance met our expectations, we managed to score close to 280 MB/s from a Patriot SuperSonic Magnum 256GB flash drive and around 550 MB/s sequential throughput from the WildFire Solid State Drive.

The Z87 chipset has all SATA 3 connectors, rather than leaving the end user fumbling through a user manual to find out which will work best with a new Solid State Drive. The ASUS Sabertooth has two additional SATA connectors over the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC, thanks to the incorporation of an additional ASMedia 6GBps controller.

We had no problems pairing this board up with the Intel Core i7 4770k processor. We achieved a prime stable overclock of 1GHZ while maintaining a reasonable thermal curve. Our 4770k sample runs very hot, even with 1.225 volts and we hope to get our hands on another sample in the near future to see if this is common, or just isolated. Thankfully the Corsair H100i coped with the hot running chip delivering a stable playing field at 4.5ghz.

The 4770k is undoubtedly faster than the 3770k on a clock per clock basis, however our 3770k sample overclocks quite easily to 5ghz and runs cooler than the 4770k engineering sample that Intel sent us. At 5ghz the 3770k will clearly outclass the 4.5ghz 4770k in a variety of duties.

This makes it a little difficult for us to recommend that everyone head online and spend a lot of money moving to the new 4770k, especially if your 3770k runs cool and overclocks to 4.8ghz – 5ghz without hassle. We have spoken to several system builders in the United Kingdom this week and they tell us that they will be not pushing their 4770k systems past 4.4ghz and they may even aim closer to 4.2ghz.

Intel have made a lot of progress in regards to power consumption and the onboard HD4600 graphics is much more capable than the previous iteration (check out the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC review we published today). That said, I don't know many people who would be buying a 4770k and not pairing it up with a discrete graphics card for more serious duties. I can't think that an enthusiast user would adopt a 4770k for a media center system either.

The recommendation for the move to a new Haswell 4770k system is a little more difficult if you are currently running with an overclocked 3770k. The benefits just don't seem tangible enough to warrant the cost of a new motherboard and processor. We would recommend saving your pennies until the next generation.

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