Asus Sabertooth 990FX Revision 3 Coming Soon

Dicehunter · 14 Jul 2016 at 18:00

Not a bad looking board but the only thing that's going to ruin the Sabertooth line is this childish RGB garbage everyone's putting on everything.

It will have RGB lights on the PCI-E clips and various other places which is a shame considering the Sabertooth boards were always the ones to go for when you wanted clean and stealthy looking boards.

It will also have USB 3.1, USB Type C and M.2 support so not a bad choice for AMD owners.

Article - http://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu...w_990fx_tuf_sabertooth_r3_0_am3_motherboard/1

darket · 15 Jul 2016 at 01:01

Looks amazing , but isn't that socket dead now ? or is amd about to do something really stupid like a re-brand of piledriver ?

spoffle · 15 Jul 2016 at 01:15

How exactly RGB lighting childish? Things aren't childish just because you don't like them.

Darket, it's technically not a dead socket as CPUs are still available for it at retail. It's just old and very soon to be obsolete.

darket · 15 Jul 2016 at 01:26

I know , but there are quite a few high end 990fx AM3 boards coming out so something is going on , AM3 hasnt seen any refreshed boards in years , i mean its been nearly 3 years since the sabertooth R2.0 and 4 years since the Formula-Z.

Dicehunter · 15 Jul 2016 at 01:34

spoffle said:
How exactly RGB lighting childish? Things aren't childish just because you don't like them.

Darket, it's technically not a dead socket as CPUs are still available for it at retail. It's just old and very soon to be obsolete.

Having blingy lights all over the place isn't needed and ends up looking like a childs toy.

RGB can be tasteful if used correctly but it's now gone way overboard.

Will_ASUSUK · 15 Jul 2016 at 11:56

Hi,

The board has just been announced. Has some excellent features including reinforced SafeSlot PCI Express, high durability and the beloved 5-year warranty. Also the beautiful Aura RGB ligthing; if you don't like it you can turn it off. Just nice to have those features should you want them.
Will.

Relentless81 · 15 Jul 2016 at 12:02

This is weird, why are there new 990fx boards?

I would have though a new chipset and socket for Zen?

dits · 17 Jul 2016 at 12:20

Do these support PCI 3.0?

robbiecfc · 27 Jul 2016 at 00:33

No PCI 3.0 support. Lack of support is going to begin to hurt from now on and not in the GPU area as most would assume but in storage. The new Samsung SM961S NVMe M.2 cards reputedly hit about 3,200MB/s but would be held to 2,300MB/s on this.
I am going to get one because I'm tired of the RAID boot delay with my LSI/IBM card. This board ticks all the boxes for me, high watt CPU support, sensible layout, USB 3.1 support + support for 4 USB 3.0 via case headers and the all important M.2 slot which only the Samsung 961 will max out. I'll get a 256GB version, retire the SSDs and upgrade the F3's to Toshiba X300s 4TB. Might even get 5.1Ghz out of the FX as a last hurrah before Zen next year

darket · 27 Jul 2016 at 13:21

dits said:
Do these support PCI 3.0?

As above no pci 3.0 support :-

3 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (dual x16 or x16/x8/x8) *1
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black)
2 x PCIe 2.0 x1

which is a little strange as the previous Sabertooth claimed :-

3 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (dual x16 or x16/x8/x8) *1
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x16 mode, black)
1 x PCI

However it must have been via a 3rd party controller as None of the current Amd chips have native pci 3.0 support.

Mr Carrot · 27 Jul 2016 at 15:05

One thing I have noticed is it doesn't have the TUFF armour the previous board had. I really liked that asthetic even if it didn't add anything!

robbiecfc · 27 Jul 2016 at 22:35

Will_ASUSUK said:
Hi,

The board has just been announced. Has some excellent features including reinforced SafeSlot PCI Express, high durability and the beloved 5-year warranty. Also the beautiful Aura RGB ligthing; if you don't like it you can turn it off. Just nice to have those features should you want them.
Will.

Any idea of when it will be actually available?

Asus UK Twitter account replied. Sometime next month - So August something or other.

robbiecfc · 2 Sep 2016 at 17:57

Picked one up last week.
Lose the PS/2 ports for USB3.1 and the PCI slot for an M.2 connector. Aura is a gimmick but can be turned off at the bios. My LSI RAID card goes through its discovery faster than with the R2.0

A couple of screenshots:

Samsung 950 Pro 500GB

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AMD FX8320E - need to work on memory timings a bit yet.

Martini1991 · 2 Sep 2016 at 18:57

Why would anyone actually buy this board? It's not exactly a low end board, but the CPU's are 4 years old as of this year, and weren't top dog when they came out

robbiecfc · 2 Sep 2016 at 20:00

Because I can and I did. Also with DirectX 12 and Windows 10, the software is finally making use of the 8 cores. By far cheaper for me to swap out a board (€200) while i'm waiting for Zen than to jump to the Intel platform. This way I keep my 8 cores @ 4.8Ghz, can enjoy the latest in USB connectivity and use the latest M.2 storage types.

h4rm0ny · 3 Sep 2016 at 13:26

darket said:
Looks amazing , but isn't that socket dead now ? or is amd about to do something really stupid like a re-brand of piledriver ?

Piledriver chips are still available and don't seem to be running out, yet. A Piledriver system actually makes a VERY good budget gaming machine as the chips are pretty cheap and unlike when Bulldozer came out, actually give pretty good performance. You should be able to run an 8350 at 4.5GHz reasonably comfortably. That's £140 for a pretty effective processor and frees up a lot more money for the GPU which will be your real bottleneck on a budget machine. Plus the Piledriver chips are actually eight core, rather than being four core with hyperthreading (assuming that you're not needing a lot of Floating Point calculations which if you're gaming you wont) so they're really coming into their own now.

I would imagine a refresh of existing motherboards to add a couple of things like M.2 and USB3.1 isn't that expensive for the OEMs. M.2 PCI-E SSDs are not quite as good as on a more modern chipset because of PCI-E v2, but they're still a major jump over the SATA ones (three or four times the speed) so well worth having.

jrwagh333 · 6 Sep 2016 at 09:23

Robbie, what combination of voltage/multipliyer/fsb are you using for 4.8? I seem to be stuck at 4.5ghz

robbiecfc · 6 Sep 2016 at 12:46

jrwagh333 said:
Robbie, what combination of voltage/multipliyer/fsb are you using for 4.8? I seem to be stuck at 4.5ghz

HTT - 260
NB - 2600
Multi - 18.5 (it was pointed out to me that the 8320E does not like high multipliers)
RAM - 1734 | 8-9-9-30 CL2
VCore - 1.52 but since tamed back at 1.43 which is application stable (Excel, Outlook, Adobe Lightroom, F1 2016, Dirt Rally & Elite Dangerous) - To be Benchmark stable I can use 1.47-8

S!

Doogles · 6 Sep 2016 at 17:54

robbiecfc said:
Because I can and I did. Also with DirectX 12 and Windows 10, the software is finally making use of the 8 cores. By far cheaper for me to swap out a board (€200) while i'm waiting for Zen than to jump to the Intel platform. This way I keep my 8 cores @ 4.8Ghz, can enjoy the latest in USB connectivity and use the latest M.2 storage types.

Yeah but even my 3570k without a overclock would rival a 8350.

robbiecfc · 6 Sep 2016 at 18:28

And your point being? Looking at your chart anything at i3 and above can run that game at that resolution and settings reasonably comfortably.
Then again why do you have a freesync monitor running an Nvidia card?