Customer Reviews

ASUS Socket 1366/Intel X58/Quad SLI & Quad CrossFireX/SATA3.0&USB3.0/A&GbE/ATX Motherboard s SABERTOOTH X58

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I like the color scheme. More importantly, I gave it a C7 i930 cpu, dropped it into my Lian Li PC70B case, attached a Hyper 212 cpu cooling tower (pictures and details at cosmic-pearl.com), added 6GB Mushkin DDR3 RAM, and have one flawlessly operating computer on hand, be it games, photo editing, or computer graphics, it gives me what I need and then some. I am using the onboard audio with the Logitech Z2300 speakers and realtek driver, and that is perfectly fine for my ears. ASUS provided the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility on the enclosed disk, but I have yet to enable the OC feature in BIOS. For now I am happy as a clam. I am even running the RAM at default speed. I ran 3D Benchmark and got 7.5, 7.5, 7.2 results, and until I need more capability, I am quite fine for now. UPDATE! I am still happy with the mobo over all, but meanwhile my audio output curcuitry went dead. Spent literally hours on the phone with ASUS to get an RMA set up. In the end I decided to take a chance and get an ASUS Xonar DG card, rather than to deal with their time-consuming cumbersome RMS process. It fixed the problem perfectly and the sound is even better now. My expense, I know, but I just was not willing to tear my computer apart, send them the mobo, and then wait for however long to get a replacement X58 from ASUS. While the ASUS people were friendly enough, I suggest that there has got to be a better way.

This is a very fine motherboard as others have said, very easy to over clock with well thought out safe guards built in. The utilities on the CD are very easy to use and just what is needed to customize your installation. Do note that most newer video cards will cover the only PCI slot. That limits your choice of add-on cards and will prohibit you from using a card from a prior PC. Also, there is an issue with the bios clearing to default every time power is lost, such as when you disconnect the power cord or shut off the power supply/strip. Update to the latest bios (v0802)dated 1/17/2011 to fix this issue. That bios also fixes some stability issues as well.

System specs:
-Intel Core i7-950 oc'd to 3.7 Ghz
-6GB DDR3 RAM oc'd to 1932 Mhz
-WD Caviar Black 64Mb cache 1TB
-Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 1.2GB Video Card

I have been skeptical on a X58 solution in the $200-$210 range. But the ASUS Sabertooth X58 board has really made me a believer. This will offer you the most bang for the buck. I have not seen an ASUS X58 board at the $200, until now. All I can say is that ASUS has outdone themselves with the feature set they put on this board. I'm not big on Overclocking, but the performance was quite amazing.

Here is the breakdown at first glance: 5 year warranty, Militarized standard certified components (Chokes, MOSEFETs, and Capacitors), Intel Core i7 support, 2 - PCI Express 2.0 @x16 (SLI and Crossfire ready), 6 - DIMM running triple channel DDR3 @ 1866MHz, USB3.0, Sata 6Gb/s, powered eSATA port and 1394a port.

ASUS has also put some of their own unique features to help with the performance and stability of the board: E.S.P. - Efficient Switching Power , MemOK!, and CeraM!X (Appears to have some kind of ceramic-coating on the heatsink - I have noticed chipset temperatures).

In my opinion, If you are in the market for a X58 chipset solution, take a look into the ASUS Sabertooth X58. At a great price and futures, you can't go wrong with this choice. ASUS made me a happy camper.

On a side note, the colors on this board looked awesome!

Pros:

Great color scheme.
Packaged nicely.
Future proof (USB 3.0, SATA 6gb/s)
BIOS is fully customizable.

Cons: Would be nice if it had more cables (SATA and such), also, it doesn't come with the standard (from what I've seen in every other board I've bought) optional USB ports to attach to your tower. Where it takes a PCI/PCI Express spot on the back of your tower. Not a big deal, since it has plenty of USB ports, just saying.

Also, when you're in BIOS there's every option you would ever want for tweaking/overclocking, however, there's an option to overclock the megahertz on your RAM to 9000mhz. What the crap? Whoever does that is foolish and will melt everything, and Asus is foolish to have that as a preset option. Another overclocking options is for your Intel i7 processor, it is titled "i7 Fast-Crazy" or something of that nature, that was just comical. Guy 1: Hey, I want my computer fast, like crazy! Guy 2: Alright, well, good thing there's a preset "Fast-Crazy" option...

All-in-all, get this board if you want something to do some serious gaming/multitasking on. You wont regret it.

***Please feel free to reply and comment, I'll get back to you with the best of my knowledge.***

I was an ASUS fan back in the early to mid nineties, but then as a result of quality/reliability issues, I switched to using Intel exclusively for the recent 15+ years. I read great reviews about this board and having build several systems using Intel's DX58S02 for clients, I thought I'd jump once again to the potential bleeding edge in an effort to save a few pennies and gain some horsepower advantage.

Initial results were good. Running side-by-side Intel DX58S02 and ASUS x58 Sabretooth machines, the quality/speed/reliability were very close. The problem immediately arose when the ASUS machine was rebooted and continually powered up with a drive failure on the RAID 5. I launched the Intel Matrix software, marked the drive as 'Good,' and over a period of ~72 hours, the array rebuilt and subsequently worked fine until another reboot attempt.

Work-a-round solution: Shut down the system instead of rebooting does appear to eliminate the problem.

I am now on my 3rd x58 board from ASUS and continue to experience the same issue. The PCU controller appears to be the culprit and my next call to ASUS, which will be tomorrow, July 18th, will be to request an upgrade to another board in their x58 chipset arsenal. If they do not agree to an upgrade, I will remove the ASUS board in favor of the Intel DX58S02.

The board installed easily and in the beginning worked well. When it powers up it tells me that it found no hard drives but somehow, Windows 7 found my Velocity Raptor and installed properly. About three weeks after I got it all working, the board stopped waking from sleep. Asus Technical Support responded with directions to erase my bios. I will try that this weekend but I woudl really like to know what is causing this. In spite of this, I would buy an ASUS board again. They are a good company and easy to work with.

Form fit and finish are outstanding. Seems "heavy duty". Some people don't like the "military" look but i do. I put it into an Antec 900 2, ver. 3 case (extra cutouts for cable mgmt and cpu access) and installation was effortless and problem free.

Asus incorporated some rly nice features such as the ceramics coating The E.S.P technology. TUF components including Alloy Choke, Cap. & MOSFET. It is spacious and has e-sata and usb ports galore.

Instructions were easy to follow and packaging was spot on in appearence and protectiion. Everything i needed was included. What more could you ask for. Great mobo for the money.

My setup = Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core
Memory = CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel.
Graphics = XFX Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express (awesome warranty)

The first Sabertooth x58 I ordered was DOA. However, after waiting 2 days Amazon shipped me out a new one and I got my rig all put together. Sits very nicely inside my Phantom case and holds all my components without any problems. The second board I got booted straight up and let me install Windows 7 without issue. One thing I like is that you are allowed to have your own boot image if you install Asus' Bios flash program. Like everyone else has said the colors are nice but if you have SLI or Crossfire set up you won't see much of those. If I had one gripe with this board it would be that with my SLI setup I have no remaining PCI slots available for any other interfaces, like wireless. However, They have USB adapters for all of that now anyways! Besides the PCI layout I love this board, good job Asus.

My current setup:
i7-950
8gb 1600Mhz RAM
128gb SSD Primary
500gb HDD Secondary
2x 465 GTX GPU
1000w PSU
BD-rom + DVD-rom

The first board I received had a faulty sound component on it and the sound would not work. After triple checking everything to make sure everything was hooked up correctly I called ASUS and left them know I had a faulty board. They directed me to Amazon since it was only a few days after I received it.

Let me just say Amazon's customer service is awesome!! My experience with them was so good I will shop here just because of that. It was way better than other online places which I will never shop again because of it. like New-egg for example.

Amazon got me a new board and shipped it next day and took the faulty board. you rock amazon!

Now about the board, after years of building computers, this is by far my favorite so far.

The marvel 6 Gb/s support is awesome and is really worth it if you want that extra edge in hard drive speeds

It comes with USB 3 support which is nice

The SLI works like a charm

The sound on the board is amazing, I hooked up a nice speaker system to it and it sounds better than my home stereo system

The board stays cool even under a load, I think its fair to say the ceramics in it play a part in that, its nothing crazy but every little bit helps

The best thing I like about it it the layout, it was pretty smartly designed. I have a Noctua 6 Heat-pipe CPU cooler and its tight but it fits even with the ram heat-sinks on granted if I wanted to use more ram one would have to run without a heat-sink but still the layout is awesome

I have enjoyed the good quality that ASUS tends to put out in their products. My last mobo died, so I decided to replace it with the sabertooth. I like the MemOK! function on the Mobo. Initially, I couldn't get the machine to recognize more than 4GB of RAM. I pushed the button and voila, it showed me the settings I needed to change in the BIOS to recognize the full installed memory.

This mobo has a lot of good features and capabilities. It's suitably capable for most folks with two video card capability (SLI or crossfire), decent on-board sound, and slots that are easy to install memory into. In fact, there's a snap only on one side of the memory, so I found it easier to install and remove the DIMMs.

The BIOS menus are quite thorough, and can be intimidating to someone new to overclocking. It does give you enough flexibility to kill your CPU if you don't know what you are doing, though it generally tells you when you are exceeding an Intel recommended spec.

The efficient switching power supply and CeraM!X features do seem to have an effect on the thermal, though I have not isolated it down to those features since I upgraded to liquid cooling and a larger case. As an engineer, the claims do make sense though.

Overall, 5 stars for a great product with a good feature set from a company with a good track record, in my opinion. I think it is fairly priced, not the most expensive, but not the bargain barrel either.