ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard Performance Review

Overclocking the ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

With stock BIOS settings, the Intel Core I7 950 processor runs with a 133MHz bus speed (base clock) and an x23.0 multiplier and x24 multiplier with turbo enabled that is used to reach the final core clock of 3.2GHz when all the cores are at full load. This is going to be the first time out the gate with the Intel Core I7 950 but I have high hopes for this combination of hardware.

I started out increasing the bus speed and leaving everything on auto which was working great. I was running into some heat issues this way, though. I changed up my tactics and manually set the processor voltage at 1.2 Volts and continued to increase the bus speed. I was able to reach a rock solid 4GHz+ oc without any additional processor voltage from the ASUS Sabertooth X58.

Once we started experiencing instability just past the 4.045GHz mark with no voltage, we started to increase the voltage. Though as good as the Titan Fenrir is, it is still only an air cooler. At 1.2625 Volts we started pushing the thermal limits of our Intel Core I7 950 with temperatures as high as 95 degrees Celsius while running Prime95 to check our stability. We were able to hit a solid 4.254GHz overclock on air! This is a great overclock on air cooling with a board that is priced as budget friendly as the $199.99 ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard is!

Once we had achieved a stable overclock we wanted to see what kind of performance increase we would see. Firing up Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage we were able to see an overall improvement of only 1171 3DMarks. This tells me that we are becoming GPU limited on our test system. Impressively though, we gained nearly 5000 3DMarks on the CPU score with our final overclock.