Legit Reviews

Just like it says. Which would you pick and why?

As I see it:

ASUS P67 Sabertooth
Pros: Excellent OC'ing, good parts, no frills, excellent BIOS, unique look.
Cons: Not Z68


eVGA Z68 FTW
Pros: Z68, excellent OC'ing, tons of PCIE slots, supports faster RAM than the Asus
Cons: More expensive, lots of unnecessary features, inferior BIOS to the Asus


I'll likely never run more than two GPUs at the same time so the ability to run 3 GPUs in SLI does nothing for me. I'm uncertain how much of a performance difference I'd see between the RAM speeds but the PC 2000+ stuff is a bit over budget for me. I'd rather use that money for an SSD. I also don't see my using SRT.

Thoughts?

The faster RAM probably equates to (at most) a 0.5 CPU divider jump. In other words you probably wouldn't notice it unless you're throwing generic benchmarks at it. I think you should go with the Z68. It really doesn't offer more than the P67. In actuality it's more like a P67 Rev. 2.0. Whatever board you get make sure it has UEFI. It's superior to a BIOS in every way. It also helps to cut down on full off to an active Windows.

The eVGA board is a full $60 more expensive than the Sabertooth is one of the major reasons I'm on the fence. That's money I could be using for a SSD.

Went to newegg again and found a price drop for a Asus motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131730 It fits in your price range.

If it was me, this is the motherboard I would buy. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131701

Why are most of the Asus boards all pastel?

The performance might not be as high as an ASUS or Gigabyte but have you looked at ASRock. Apparently it's a spinoff of ASUS so they aren't skimping on the engineering.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813157264

Reviews:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/mother ... 3-review/1
http://www.madshrimps.be/articles/article/1000212
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/4326/a ... index.html

You know I've never personally used an Asrock board but I've heard good things about them over the years. Kinda a secret weapon in some gamers arsenal. Maybe I need to look at them again and see what's up. The board is definately decent looking, although I question why they even bother to put a FDD connector on there. I don't think I've seen a FDD in a computer in like 8 years.

The Asus Sabertooth apparently has some weird hit-or-miss issue with sleep mode. Apparently some people are reporting that if the systems put into sleep mode the machine goes autistic and will not boot up again without powercycling. That's a... pretty big problem. I put my PC to sleep whenever I'm not using it and if it can't do that then no matter how cool it looks or how well it overclocks I'm not going to buy it.


I'm really leaning pretty heavily towards the EVGA Z68 FTW.



It IS pretty pricey though.

Keep this in mind. The EVGA board is EATX standard. Make sure it will fit in your case before you buy it. It would suck to go install it only to find out you need a new case too.

Major_A wrote:Keep this in mind. The EVGA board is EATX standard. Make sure it will fit in your case before you buy it. It would suck to go install it only to find out you need a new case too.

It's a Corsair 800D. I should be ok.

Yeah that will work.

I just noticed something else about the eVGA boards. They have socket 775 mounting holes in addition to he 1155 holes! That means I can just bolt on my Swiftech GTZ without ordering brackets for it! Now THAT is something other vendors should offer!

Skippman wrote:I just noticed something else about the eVGA boards. They have socket 775 mounting holes in addition to he 1155 holes! That means I can just bolt on my Swiftech GTZ without ordering brackets for it! Now THAT is something other vendors should offer!

So does the Asrock Extreme4 Gen3.

As you can see in my sig this is the board I have and to be honest I like it a lot. The only issue seems to be with support but I've heard bad about all of the mfgrs. If you are sure that you wont be going tr-sli the Asrock is worth a look.

With this RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231314 it took me about 45 seconds to get to a prime stable 4.6GHZ on a 2600k. I'm sure I could go higher if a delved into tweaking further.

The two most common complaints seem to be occasional BSOD when using just the iGPU on idle (not an issue with discrete graphics) and USB 3.0 issues with the Ektron controller (drivers seem to fix most of it).

The coolest was just moving the SSD and HDD from the X58 system over to the Z68, setting AHCI in UEFI and booting straight into Windows with only a couple of reboots for driver updates. Not saying to get the board as support may be lacking at least for now but the savings might help with that SSD.