ASUS Sabertooth P67A B3 Review
Conclusion
Published: 8th April 2011 | Source: ASUS | Price: £149.99 |
Conclusion
As we said at the start, the X58 Sabertooth is, in our opinion, the best X58 board around. Amazing feature-set and blistering performance at a fraction of the price of high-end offerings.
The P67A B3 Revision Sabertooth is just as impressive.
It has all the accoutrements you'd hope to see from a modern motherboard. A lack of the obsolete Floppy and IDE sockets, plenty of fan headers and USB3.0 ports, along with SATA3 and the link. It truly is bristling with all the features that 95% of us require.
Performance is right up there with the very best. We got 5 GHz out of our Core i5-2500K without too much effort and although we needed to drop the voltage for reliabilities sake it was bombproof at 4.8 GHz and quite happily ran everything we threw at it without breaking a sweat.
The looks are something we particularly like. We fell in love with the subtle hues of the original Sabertooth and they are replicated here, but with the addition of the Thermal Armor which covers most of the untidy looks of a standard motherboard. Once all the hardware is installed it really looks an integral part of your system and the room for customisation is obviously something we like very much indeed.
It's worth mentioning that despite some slight concerns about how well the Thermal Armor would channel airflow, and the airflow itself after it's come across the CPU heatsink, at no point did the temperatures stray from anything other than the norm. So although the motherboard temperatures did NOT drop as you would be lead to believe by Asus, they certainly did not increase through insulation as we had suspected when we first saw the design. Looks and performance in one package. In fact our only tiny blemish is the need to either have a downward facing cooler to aid the motherboard cooling, which takes away some of the best CPU cooler options, or to mount a tiny fan which wont be kind to your ears.
To be honest if this was priced at £250 we'd still consider it a worthy purchase, so to find it available for £150 makes every other motherboard look either overpriced or under-featured. Unless you have a specific need for more than two graphics cards, or whatever tiny differences a higher-priced board is furnished with, then your list of potential purchases should only contain one board, the ASUS P67A B3 Sabertooth.
Awesome looks and equally stunning performance at a price so low we'd expect it to be shouted at us in a late night advert; "Come to Crazy ASUS where we're practically giving away epic performance at a tiny price".
One of the easiest OC3D Gold Award winners there is, an absolute must purchase, and at this price we have to give it our OC3D Value Award too.
Thanks to ASUS for providing the Sabertooth for review. Discuss in our forums.
Most Recent Comments
please stop putting XXXXXXXXXXX-rated nerd porn on here - my ticker cannot take it
the whole package - awesome board
Great review as per.
an owl to owl (lol) between the NH-D14 and the new NH-C14?
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Originally Posted by zeppas
Awesome, love the sabertooth. Speaking of downward facing coolers, when will we see a head to head, a mano a mano, an owl to owl (lol) between the NH-D14 and the new NH-C14? |
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Originally Posted by hurrakan
What about SATA performance? |
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Originally Posted by Tortuga
That is awesome. A motherboard with a color scheme the D14 can actually work with? Crazy. Now we need some military-esque looking ram. |
and a Thermaltake Frio cooler. All going good so far.Couple things about the installation process I think might be worth mentioning.
1.) The Sabertooth comes with a sticker over the ram slots, which needs to be removed carefully, or else it can tear and leave parts stuck to the slots. Just be careful; I had to take quite a bit of time clearing small parts of sticker off >.>
2.) With a Thermaltake Frio installed and Vengeance in place in slots A2 and B2 (Asus recommend populating these first), there is *no* room left to use slots A1 and B1 with more Vengeance. The Frio blocks slot A1. Ram with lower heat spreaders might fit, I don't know.
It looks like one hell of a lovely board, and I think I'm going to have a fun weekend testing it
Im pretty sure the word you were looking for was bought not brought.We've always disliked companies continuing to sell you a product after you've brought it, and this sticker here can be put in that category. Ordinarily this would be a minor issue, but it's vital if manufacturers do want to put sticky things in places you need that the sticker is of the very finest quality, otherwise you have the problem we had. Gently pulling it off it decided to leave bits of it behind. A real pain to clean up. If we've brought the item we know how great it is
Nice review; seeing all these close up photos, I feel like borging together a Sabertooth-est cover out of aluminium for a future build. Teh ideas are aflowing.
How's a guy to chose what to swap out for.
dunno bout this one though with the shrowd over most of the mobo, on one hand it looks cleaner, on the other seems like the likely hood of dust getting in is actually greater and then you'd have to remove it to clean it anyway. and weather it would actually help with cooling is another thing.
seems a bit pricey too here's the price at one of my local shops. Our Price: $9999.00
That must be one hell of a board
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Originally Posted by GameOverAUS
Too many awesome looking new boards with all more or less the same stuff on em coming out. How's a guy to chose what to swap out for. dunno bout this one though with the shrowd over most of the mobo, on one hand it looks cleaner, on the other seems like the likely hood of dust getting in is actually greater and then you'd have to remove it to clean it anyway. and weather it would actually help with cooling is another thing. seems a bit pricey too here's the price at one of my local shops. Our Price: $9999.00 That must be one hell of a board |
The same place also told some guy that IDE is the same as Sata.
well yes it performs the same function but it's not the same
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Originally Posted by SirPhilby
I really really like this board and would be interested in getting this and an i5 2500k if I didn't have a sneaking suspiscion that they'd release 1154 socket in 3 month's time... |
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Originally Posted by SirPhilby
I really really like this board and would be interested in getting this and an i5 2500k if I didn't have a sneaking suspiscion that they'd release 1154 socket in 3 month's time... |
EDIT: Even though the CPU costs like £2300.
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Originally Posted by adamjamesroe
No, its all about Socket 1567; would love some company to release a consumer level mobo that supports this 8 Core 16 Threads of pure Xeon X7550 Power!!! EDIT: Even though the CPU costs like £2300. |
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