ASUS Sabertooth 990FX – AM3+ – TUF Series – ATX AMD 990FX DDR3 1800 Motherboards
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- AMD Socket AM3+ FX / Phenom II / Athlon II / Sempron 100 Series Processors
- AMD 990FX / SB950 Chipset
- CeraM!X – Premium ceramic-coating technology provides best heat dissipation
- TUF Thermal Radar – Real-time thermal detection with professional user mode for customized settings
- TUF Capacitors, Chokes and MOSFETS – Certified by military standard to ensure ultimate durability
- DIGI+ VRM – New Era of Digital Power Design that fully enables Superior System Stability, High Power Efficiency and Improved Performance Scaling
- Efficient Switching Power (E.S.P) – Higher Power Efficiency; Higher Reliability
The TUF Series delivers preeminent stability, all-around compatibility, and extreme durability, providing the most reliable computing experience.
Asus motherboard
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX – AM3+ – TUF Series – ATX AMD 990FX DDR3 1800 Motherboards
List Price: $ 212.40
Price:
Good choice for the AMD Phenom II x6,
Overall, I find this board to be very well constructed, simple to install, excellent for overclocking, and very well stocked with I/O options.
I have paired this motherboard with the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Processor. I’m using a Thermaltake VL10001W2Z case and an Antec EA-750 Green power supply. My memory configuration is two Corsair XMS3 8 GB 1333 MHz PC3-10666, for a total of 16Gb.
Pro:
Very simple or very sophisticated overclocking. The basic “turbo” mode in the BIOS setup steps the Phenom II x6 up to 3.8 Ghz, just like that. If one wants to do a lot of overclocking, then the advanced BIOS options allow just about anything. If the overclock doesn’t work, the BIOS will let you know after a manual power off. This board is an overclocker’s dream. There is also a convenient “clear BIOS” button on the board, in case you REALLY goof it up.
Many of the board components are tested to “MIL SPEC”, which means military standards. They will survive higher than normal temperature conditions and still work. Many components are covered with special materials for extra cooling, and metal parts have micro sized distortions (like the dimples on a golf ball), which create more cooling area, and thus better efficiency.
The manual is very good and quite clear. Along these lines, the website has all the drivers, updates, and manuals within easy web browsing.
The board rear output has a single powered (and two non powered) Esata ports, two USB-3, 10 USB 2, a 1394 port, plus the usual sound & etc. There are an additional two USB-3 pins on the motherboard. Internally, it sports 6 600 mb/sec SATA and two 300Mb/sec SATA ports. It comes with 4 SATA cables and a crossfire cable.
The board supports three high speed PCI-e cards.
One really nice feature (for the system builder) is that there is a small removable block containing the pins for power, HDD, etc. One conveniently plugs in the case cables to this block, then slides the block onto the motherboard pins. This makes it a lot easier to connect them.
The bios is visual, and runs a mouse. The “EZ” version has basic settings, while the “Advanced” version offers more choices. One thing that you might note is that if you are upgrading, the board is set by default to ACHI for the SATA, which means that Windows may not boot unless you first set the BIOS to “IDE”. For Windows 7 users, there is a way to modify the registry to enable ACHI (google it). This is not important if the previous installation had ACHI.
The board has lights for each of the main functions (memory, bood device, CPU, etc). If for some reason it won’t boot, you can look inside and see which light is lit, saving a lot of trouble shooting time.
There are several nice utilities that run under windows (I’m on Win 7 Pro). These allow one to set various settings, and view information about the board status. One valuable display shows the entire motherboard, with temperature colors for critical locations. This would be nice to trouble shoot cooling issues.
In the “way cool” section, the board has utilities that allow one to change the boot image, so you can put your favorite picture up there when the computer starts up.
Con:
I think the BIOS is miscalculating the CPU temperature. The temperature has to be calculated from data provided by the Northbridge chip. I have seen temperatures in the BIOS that exceed the specs for my CPU! I am trusting the ones provided by CoreTemp, which use calculations provided by AMD. I don’t know how ASUS calculates the temperatures it reports, but I don’t trust the results they present.
Sometimes the BIOS was a bit confusing, but that is mostly because I am used to older BIOS.
The board is designed around the AMD 990 chipset, but they chose to integrate the legacy SATA (two ports on board and the three ESATA ports on the back) via a different chipset from Jmicron inc. It is a bit unusual to see the Jmicron looking for devices on the SATA (it shows up before the AMI bios page). I’m not sure why they did this for the SATA, since the newer 600 mb/sec standard is backwards compatible, but maybe that is just the easiest way for them to do it. Not really a “con”, but surprising in such an advanced board.
I have not yet…
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OpenSUSE 12.1 needs network driver update to work right…,
I installed OpenSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE on this motherboard with a AMD Phenom II T1100 6 core processor, Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 1600 RAM, OCZ Solid 3 SATA3 60GB SSD connected to MB connector SATA3G_E1 in about 7 minutes. Everything works except the RTC8111E based network adapter [and later I discovered USB 2.0 and RAID HD Partitioning, described below]. Downloading the 8111E Linux driver from Realtek solved the problem. The Realtek driver was trivial to install, just unpack and (as root) run the autoinstall “./autorun.sh” script. The problem is the r8169 driver shipped with many Linux kernels (including 12.1’s 3.1.0 kernel) incorrectly identifies itself as the right driver. The Realtek driver r8168-8.027.00.tar.bz2 builds and installs the correct 8168 driver which works perfectly with DHCP on my IPv4 network. This is a problem that needs to be fixed at kernel dot org for all distributions.
The installed r8169 driver setup with a Static IP address worked well enough to download the 8168 driver from Realtek.
This board also worked fine with Windows 7 Enterprise x64.
I particularly like this board because it is built with high reliability components, the type I’d want in a server that’s likely to run non-stop for 5 years. An enclosed “Certificate of Reliablity” explains what motherboard parts meet which standards to achieve “reliability”. I also used a ($160) Kingwin 550W supply with power factor of 1.0 and Plus 80 “Platinum” rating so this new box will run as efficiently as possible (92%) over the next 5 years… the power savings even at $0.08/KWH will pay for the supply in 5 years. Read reviews of these new supplies as “modified sine-wave” UPS’s may have to be replaced with more expensive sine-wave output UPS to function correctly with newer high efficiency supplies.
Update 7-JAN-2012
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I discovered two more problems which were resolved by upgrading the delivered 0705 BIOS to version 0901;
1) My USB keyboard and mouse [and anything else USB] only worked on the two USB 3.0 ports under OpenSUSE 12.1 x64. Upgrading the BIOS from delivered 0705 to 0901 allowed OpenSUSE 12.1 x64 to recognize all USB devices on all USB 3.0/2.0 ports. The USB keyboard/mouse/flash-drive did work on the USB 2.0 ports when only talking to the BIOS (no OS loaded).
2) OpenSUSE 12.1 x86_64 wouldn’t manage the partitions with GNU “parted” on two 500GB hard drives connected to SATA5 & SATA6. This wouldn’t allow me to setup RAID-1 for the system. Upgrading BIOS from 0705 to 0901 solved this problem.
Of course with USB 2.0 ports not working, using a USB pen drive, USB DVD-ROM writer, USB floppy, USB Mouse, USB Keyboard or anything else on the 2.0 ports under OpenSUSE 12.1 x64 didn’t work [they do now after upgrading BIOS to 0901]
UPGRADING THE DELIVERED BIOS was easy, dealing with the anxiety of upgrading BIOS was not… I downloaded the SABERTOOTH-990FX-ASUS-0901.ROM image from ASUS web site as a ZIP file. Unpacked the 4MB .ROM file to a 4GB FAT32 formatted USB stick on an older working system. Placed the USB stick in one of the USB 2.0 slots on the back of the motherboard. Rebooted and entered BIOS “Advanced Mode”. Went to “Tools” and EZ BIOS Upgrade. Pressed F2 and saved the delivered 0705 BIOS to a file I called “Delivered_BIOS_0705.ROM” (this file saved to the same USB Pen Drive the 0901 upgrade was on). After this said it was done, I told it to upgrade using the SABERTOOTH-990FX-ASUS-0901.ROM file on the Pen Drive. It took a little while, but not nearly as long as I expected, then told me it had to reboot. I clicked “OK” and waited. The power supply even turned off. While I was contemplating pressing the “POWER” button, about 10 seconds later the system turned itself back on. i.e. from the time I clicked “OK” with the mouse to reboot until the system rebooted by itself was all hands off, just wait and watch.
The BIOS said it needed to enter setup to re-save settings, so press F1. I did. Checked a few settings (my memory was set back to DDR3-1333, and I set it back to DDR3-1600 {what I bought}, for instance). After this, I did a SAVE/Reboot and booted into OpenSUSE 12.1 x86_64. My network driver wasn’t working right, so I did a reinstall of the 8168 driver {as described above} and now all appears to be working. My earlier USB and hard disk RAID problems were solved by a 0901 BIOS upgrade!
And I’m using this new system to update this review. With 6 processors and x64 Linux, this system is lightning fast (even Firefox and Chrome load in the blink of an eye from the Solid State Disk-SSD)!
Now that I know everything works, I’ll finish system setup and order another board for hardware backup. What I’ve learned over decades of computing is motherboard designs only last about 3-6 months. So if you need a drop in replacement for something critical [like a SOHO…
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Runs Linux Like a Champ!,
Just so people know, even with the noise recently about UEFI BIOS only allowing OEM Microsoft products to boot, this board runs Linux like a champ. I don’t believe this version of UEFI BIOS even supports the boot image signing but it might in the future with an update. Either way, if it does get added, it should allow disabling that feature so other OSes besides Winderz can load.
Everything was recognized by OpenSuSe 11.4 just fine. I’d imagine it would be the same for other distros. The only thing I couldn’t figure out right off was how to RAID my drives. I plan to revisit that. I could RAID them but not get Linux to use the onboard RAID controller. Might just do software RAID in Linux itself. But the networking, audio, USB, and everything else was fine. It just works.
One thing that has been an issue with Linux and BIOS upgrades is a number of the manufacturers use Windows-based BIOS upgrade apps or you have to boot from a diskette. This board allows you to grab a BIOS image from a USB drive and do the update in the BIOS itself. Nice.
Overall quality looks great. The power supply section is low profile so lots of cooling solutions should fit well. It seems to run cool for all the horsepower, it makes it very quiet as well.
It’s a nice board and I should be set for some time.
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