ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard Performance Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

What more is there to say about the ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard? Honestly, not a whole lot. We could talk about the looks of the ASUS Sabertooth X58. Just because I like them, you may not. The aesthetics of the ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard have a like ’em or hate ’em feel to them; I may be wrong, though. Looks are all going to be about personal preference and that is for you to decide. What I can tell you is that this sub-$200 motherboard is a beast!

First we will look at the positive aspects of the ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard. Performance, Performance, Performance! The ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard has no shortage of performance. In all of our benchmarks today the ASUS Sabertooth X58 was running neck and neck and usually leading the much pricier MSI Big Bang XPower. Overclocking ability was unreal for $195.00! I was able to boot the system at over 4.3GHz and with some more work and some liquid cooling we probably could have gotten rock solid stability at 4.3GHz and higher.

The only negative aspect to the ASUS Sabertooth X58 that I see is the network performance. Even that isn’t a deal breaker. How often do you truly send a huge amount of sustained data across your network? If you do frequently, you probably aren’t going to be using onboard network cards, anyway. The shortage of network throughput isn’t likely to be something you will ever notice during online gaming or any of the day to day network tasks like streaming movies from the internet or across your network. If you aren’t sure what I am referring to, you must have accidentally looked past the Network Throughput page. If so, you can find it here. A quick recap and we can point out that nine out of the ten boards that we have tested have a throughput of ~940-945Mbits/s. The ASUS Sabertooth was only able to achieve 752.336Mbits/s and when we pinged ASUS about this variance from all of the other boards this was their response:

“It is due to the use of a PCI based network controller as opposed to a PCI-E based network controller. Your number is approximate to what we have from internal testing. Due to the considerably higher quality components as well validation and other specific elements on the SABERTOOTHX58 this compromise was put into effect by the product manager. As most users realistically do not put heavy throughput loads on their network it was felt while not perfect it was practical implementation. In real world reality the performance offered of approximate 85 to 90MB is sufficient for even high performance data transfers including backups and HD streams.” – ASUS PR

I think ASUS put their money where their mouth is with the ASUS Sabertooth X58. The claim from ASUS with regards to the Sabertooth X58 is of reliability. To back this claim up they have given the TUF series, including the ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard, a five year warranty. This five year warranty is 66% longer than the traditional three years of most of their motherboards.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard is a sub-$200 motherboard that can run with the best of them, but is priced well below the best of them!