Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
ASUS has a lovely offering with the new Z97 SaberTooth mark 1. Opposed to our recent reviews from say MSI and others, this board is more price savvy, and you can see why ... no extra KillerNIC, WIFI, buttons, Diagnostic LEDS and so on. In fact aside from Sata Express which NOBODY has or uses, the difference inbetween the Z87 and Z97 model are almost NIL. Well aside from a tweak in the thermal armor. So upgrade wise, this makes no sense whatsoever. Obviously ASUS has an extensive range of motherboard for each price segment. But yeah the TUF series always has been designed with an affordable budget in mind.
The benefit is that it could be a lower cost motherboard, we expect it to be at or under the 200 EUR marker. Obviously ASUS has an extensive range of motherboard for each price segment. Please do read our ASUS Z97-A review as well, as that board is sheer value for money at only 125 EUR!
The Platform & The Motherboard
Now, the Intel Z97 chipset all by itself is not really interesting from an upgrade point of view if you bought a PC in say the last two years. It is a re-spin of the Z87 DNA. There are a couple of differences that the chipset however offers, and that's making PCI-E storage units compatible with standards like SATA Express and M.2 PCI-E SSDs. But if you purchased a Z87 motherboard and a Haswell processor last year already, by all means there is just no reason to upgrade whatsoever. Even coming from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors and the Z77 platform will not change my mind about this recommendation. The big conundrum however is this: Z97 motherboards can be very interesting if you are in need of an upgrade. See the motherboard manufacturers simply went nuts with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The latest iteration of the MSI Click BIOS uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. It's easy to navigate through with and without a mouse and a couple of new features like the monitoring pages just kick black booty. So pop a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4600 MHz range with a 4770K easily. But before we talk dirty tweakin' we must state that the overall baseline (non overclocked) performance is top notch as well. MSI applied a small tweak on the processor's turbos so you'll see them hovering at 3900/4000 MHz; a bit faster than they are supposed to go. All manufacturers apply this tweak with their high-end SKUs though. But performance wise on all fronts, CPU, storage and memory this Z97 Gaming AC performs extremely well.
Storage
Combined with six SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly argue anything. Four of them are provided by the Intel Z97 chipset and two more are controlled by ASMedia ICs, and these have become pretty decent really. So storage wise there's just really little to complain about. I absolutely fail to see as to why there is no M.2 interface though, huge miss. You do get SATA Express, but you can't purchase any compatible SSDs whilst M.2 is available wide spread.
Aesthetics
The back-plate shield kicks ass, and makes this a very sturdy motherboard. Now we can discuss back and forth what the added benefit of the shielding is and if the prognosed airflow improvements actually make a difference. I'll leave that to you to decide, as I unfortunately am an uber-sceptic. Admittedly, the shields do look nice in an all black PC case, combine it with some liquid cooling on the processor and things will start to look rather shweeeeeet. However, and this might be a little personal, I do start to dislike the brown/beige stuff on the SaberTooth for some reason. Then again mount a Noctua cooler on this puppy and you got a rock solid color theme there. Perhaps a new color change for the upcoming releases, ASUS? How about black/white/grey eh? Overall though it's a terrific looking motherboard with a proper layout
Performance and Tweaking
Overall non-overclocked performance as stated is above the baseline of the reference Z87 motherboards we tested, with an offset here and there of course. We mentioned it in the first chapter of this conclusion already, overall non-overclocked performance as stated is above the baseline of the reference Z97 motherboards we tested, with an offset here and there of course. The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected. We got the 4770K processor rocking stable at 4800 MHz with the memory (XMP enabled) at 2133 MHz very easily, and that's not bad at all. One we added voltage and combined the Core i7 4770K processor with a H110 Liquid cooler from Corsair you prolly could reach a stable 4900 MHz. But as mentioned so often, Haswell processors run hotter when overclocked opposed to Sandy Bridge, reaching ~4900 MHz might be easy to accomplish with the motherboard but you'll find yourself needing juice in the 1.325~1.400 Volts range of the processor and that requires massive cooling. So be prepared for processor heat, proper liquid cooling definitely deserves a recommendation here alright. But follow our tip, defaults, 48 Turbo multiplier, XMP enabled and boom you are good to go at 4800 MHz with stable performance and temperatures (depending on your cooling).
Nitpicking
No AC WIFI ? No M.2. PCIE SSD slot ?
Final Words
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