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

When we first fired up the Asus Z87 Sabertooth, the bios was a working engineering version and the voltage was set incorrectly for the Core i7 4770k.

Luckily we received an updated BIOS direct from ASUS and flashed immediately. This resolved the issues.

I have always preferred ASUS bios configurations to any of their competitors and I was able to immediately find my way around this BIOS without a problem. The user is immediately presented with a simplified version of the BIOS with some pre-configured options and a boot priority section along the bottom.

We opted for ‘advanced' mode – as the majority of enthusiast users will be using this section for finer configurations and to overclock. The ‘Main' menu highlights the BIOS revision, build date, the processor details and clock speed. We used the XMP profile to set up the Corsair Vengeance correctly to 2,400mhz.


The AI Tweaker section is the main overclocking panel and one you will be spending a lot of time within. Those of you who have used an ASUS bios before will find this immediately comfortable and intuitive. All the settings are in a long scrollable menu system. We will look at this closer shortly when we overclock.

Along the bottom of this section are the voltage details for the i7 4770k. The Asus Z87 Sabertooth defaults the processor to 0.992V.

The Advanced panel offers configuration options for various sections of the board, such as the SATA and USB controllers.

The Monitor and Boot panels allow checking of temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. You can configure the boot priority and fast boot options also.

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