Hardware Asus Sabertooth P67 Review

Can't you turn that heatsink 90 degrees?

 

When I first installed it, it was 3 am... So I was not lucid I even forgot to connect the fans to the board

now it's in place



@Tarikk

Max temp using IBT

 

1st and foremost, your new rating/scoring system sucks beyond all reason. Now, I read the details here and then I have to go to some other review site to see if the product is actually worth a damn or not.
If the shroud on this thing were any good at all then it would be implemented on most other ASUS mobo's. I think of it as front-wheel drive on cars. If it's so damned good then it should be used on trucks and especially tractor-trailers. A car being this Sabretooth P67. A truck being a P8P67-Deluxe and a tractor-trailer as being a Maximus IV Extreme.
This motherboard looks like a dog, runs like a dog and works like a dog trying to convince you it's something other than a dog. So it's a dog. Why not just say so?
ASUS is a big company that can easily absorb honest, outright criticism, so tell them (and especially US) that their Sabretooth P67 isn't worth buying. Don't worry. You'll still be receiving your freebies from them for you to evaluate. ASUS, and your readers, are smart enough to see through your little ploy of a completely equivocal rating system. So why don't you go back to your original rating system and quit making fools of yourselves? You'll only gain respect and lose a little derision and a sense of a dishonest review. You can live (and profit)from that.

 

Review FAIL! The failure to properly investigate the Thermal Armor was terrible. Every other site who's tested temps with and without it have reported positively on it, except you who choose not to even test with it on! Ridiculous! One of the worst BT reviews yet. Poor understanding and investigation led to incomplete and misleading results.

 

Yah I read it, but still don't like it. Bring old scoring system back please or improve current.

 

so one of the biggest features of this motherboard is this shield which is suppose to cool everything better and yet you guys dont test this??? lol or did I some how miss the charts somewhere???

 

No, HourBeforeDawn, they failed this review totally. I've seen at several other review sites the shield does improve temperatures, but really does it's best when using the cut out for a 50mm add-in fan. And with the fan, it keeps the extra components cooler then other boards that don't have the shield.

 

id love to see how this board performs without the thermal shield just for comparison

 

Just to quickly explain, we didn’t test the thermal properties of the shroud for a couple of reasons.

First was that the board ran stably throughout our performance tests and didn’t get unusually hot (or run unusually cool) at any point. This, coupled with the fact that our resident Asus employee has himself said that nothing under the shroud is thermally important these days, meant we really didn’t believe the shroud had a major impact on the performance of any relevant part of the board. Hence we believed its main influence was aesthetic, which we spoke about in the review.

The second reason was time. If we did think it was relevant to test the thermal benefits of the shroud we’d have wanted to do it properly (i.e. in a case with a number of different types of cooler) but we had seven B3 P67 motherboards to test and write up in little over a week. This meant there simply wasn’t the time available to do extra testing in an area which was unlikely to greatly influence the content, tone or ultimate score of the review.

We could have quickly temperature tested the board on the test bench we were working on of course (as other publications have) but this approach will produce largely irrelevant results - you won’t be running this board on a test bench, you’ll be running it in a case with all the airflow, board orientation and heat source advantages and disadvantages that this brings.

If there is an appetite for seeing how the board performs thermally with and without the shroud in real world situations then we'll look into doing some anecdotal testing on it to satisfy that, maybe in the form of a short blog or one page article.

 

Nice bit of context material. I would like to see it tested with and without the cover. Presumably the biggest feature would also be the decreased likelihood of component failure which should be negated by the higher quality "military tested" components anyway.

I like the look of the shroud myself and have actually ordered this mobo.

 

interesting layout, i'm waiting for nex gen lg2011 cpu and i hope asus will bring the sabertooth shroud design to a lg2011 mobo

 

Good, out with the other six then

 

@Material yes Im sure there is enough people here that would be interested in seeing one the main market points of this board and how it does perform in a wide array of coolers and water cooling and so forth.

 

beautiful mobo...

 

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20863/2

I remember the preview/whatever where we first saw the shroud... There was a debate with me saying that wrapping hot parts in plastic has rarely made them any cooler, versus some others telling how Asus' engineers surely know better. The thing is, it isn't the engineers who come up with this crap.

Ofcourse if you're just buying it for the looks, you probably don't care about any of this. You may, however, care about the fact that a custom made "stealth" plate over the motherboard is always going to look better and will also mean you can use any other mobo out there.

 

Interesting link Jipa. Their conclusions seem to concur with our fears about the shroud.

 

Hey V3ctor

I noticed that you are using the Noctua NH12UP SE2/ ASUS Sabertooth P67/HX850W, same as me. Did you or have had any issues with the vga light coming on at all and not booting?. Did you use the rubber inlay for the backplate on the NH12UP SE2?