|
|
Asus SABERTOOTH 55i Review
[Abstract]
The First TUF Board Thermal shock test? Check. Vibration test? Check. Mechanical shock test? Check. moisture resistance test? Check. Solder bath test? Check. The list continues on the certif...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
BIOS Settings
It's the familiar ASUS BIOS that we have already seen on the Maximus III Formula. One of the main differences we noticed about ASUS' P55 motherboards so far is that the CPU Ratio setting available ranges from 9x to 24x, when other brands (and the reference chipset) go up to 22x for our Core i7-870 processor. The other settings are as follows:
- Base Clock: 80 - 500MHz
- CPU Ratio: 9 - 24x
- Memory Ratio: Auto, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600
- CPU Voltage: 0.85 - 1.7V (in 0.00625V steps)
- Memory Voltage: 1.2 - 2.5V (in 0.0125V steps)
- IMC Voltage: 1.1 - 1.7V (in 0.00625V steps)
- PCH Voltage: 1.05 - 1.15V (in 0.10V steps)
When it came to overclocking, the SABERTOOTH 55i was on par with the top P55 motherboards we tested recently, reaching a maximum of 210MHz after pushing up the relevant voltages. Unlike ASUS' Maximus III Formula, there are no excessive onboard features that are geared for overclocking but the SABERTOOTH does decently here without any of that.
Test Setup
With our recent mainstream P55 motherboard shootout, we went with Windows 7 as the operating system. Similarly, this OS was used for the SABERTOOTH 55i testing. Naturally, we used our previous results for comparison. The configuration used:
- Intel Core i7-870 (@2.93GHz, Intel Turbo Boost, HyperThreading enabled)
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0 (ECS P55H-A was running DDR3-1333@8-8-8-24)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
- ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB with ForceWare 190.38 drivers
- Intel INF 9.1.0.1007 and Intel Matrix Storage manager 8.6.0.1007 driver set
- Microsoft Windows 7
The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the P55 motherboards. Note that we ran into issues while using the Vantage edition of benchmarks and thus we're using older equivalents here for the time being until we've sorted the issue with Futuremark:
BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 3)
Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
SPECviewperf 9.0
Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
AquaMark3
Far Cry 2
|
|
|
