ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: First things first, the TUFF armor is pretty sweet. At first I didn't buy into the whole thermal stuff about the fans and MOBO airflow. But I was wrong. When the little fans are installed this thing moves quite a bit of air through the mobo which is really nice. I even had dust accumulation on the exhaust port which is a good sign.

I love the 4 pin PWM fan connections all over this board. I like to run quiet when I need it and fast and loud when i'm under load and PWM is an awesome thing. Also the thermal armor software allows you to set tolerance with temperature and stuff so you can control your cases temp and monitor it extremely effectively. Really love that feature.

Rocks for gaming. Paired this with a GTX 660, i7 3770k, and some Gskill 1866 rip jaws and it destroys.

Cons: 1866 mhz limit on RAM frequency? It seems that way because it's listed but the ASUS website says you can get up to 2400 Mhz range so I guess it's not really a con... I was disappointed cause I was afraid of compatibility issues otherwise I would have gotten 2133 at least. People say it doesn't make a huge difference but they are incorrect. Faster RAM has awesome advantages.

I also had problems with my bios OC settings not taking hold in windows, I simply flashed my bios back to an older version and it has worked great since. Think i'm still running 1507 bios or something like that with my Ivy bridge.

Not really a con since the difference is negligible but when you run two cards in SLI or if you have something like a dedicated PhysX card they switch to PCI 3.0 x8 which is the same as PCI 2.0 x16. That's all good really but it is disappointing that this nice of a board can't get PCI 3.0 x16 even when in SLI.

Other Thoughts: I was thinking of cons and limitations but when it came down to it this is a great board.

It may actually have TOO MANY features if that's even possible. I had some trouble with the software overclocking stuff that was overriding my bios and causing my overclock to not go into effect on startup. Also network icontrol is a poor poor piece of software I highly recommend disabling it, you'll see much better download and browsing speeds.

I only use the monitor and the thermal software. Other than that there isn't much use to a lot of the software. Please people, use the bios for overclocking. It will be better, more consistent and easier to customize and stabilize.

System:

COOLER MASTER HAF 912 ATX Mid tower
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W ATX12V (not modular but still great!)
ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77 LGA 1155 Intel Z77
Intel i7 3770k 3.5 Ghz (3.9 turbo) -- Overclocked to 4.8 Ghz at 1.33v---stable on IBT
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)
Antec KUHLER H2O 920 Liquid Cooling System
MSI GeForce GTX 660 SC GDDR5 Twin Frozr III (going to SLI soon)

Pros: I installed the board a week ago and have not had any issues with it so far. The anti surge protection restarted my system on a few occasions during high usage. I replaced the psu and no more restart issues. It's been running stable ever since. I have not oc'd yet. If I run into any oc issues I will update this post.

Cons: The sata ports are angled off to the side of the board instead of up. Asus missed the mark on this. The angle makes it more difficult to insert/remove.

Pros: All! This board has everything you could want. To overclocking features etc.

Cons: None!

Pros: Fast sata controllers. (until they break)
Fast PCIe 3.0. (Until the controller fails)
Military grade components with a 5 year gold star warranty ( which is great on paper but real bad when it breaks.)

Cons: Military grade high end motherboards should last more than a year. I didn't even overcloak just used the ASUS optimized settings. I dust a clean my case out once a month. I use high quality video cards, ram, psu, and sound cards none have which failed and all of which had better call center support than ASUS.

Other Thoughts: The warranty sucks. Rapid RMA means you have a 3-4 week hold fro $270 bucks from your account. Or send your board in for 2-3 weeks for repair. I thought I paid more for a high end board and warranty. This is the same Rma process for the low end asusrocks boards. So why did I pay $170 more for the high end model that breaks in a year? Don't be a chump like me save the money order a cheaper board from msi or spend 300 with evga. ASUcks.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you are having bad issues with your board. Our advance replacement program doesn't take 3-4 weeks. What we will do is check to see if you qualify for advance replacement. Once we see that you qualify, we will look for a replacement board to send out to you. We will reserve that board and send you the necessary forms. Once you have filled out the forms properly we will now have 48 hours to ship you the board depending on your preference.

Once you receive the replacement board and it's working properly, you will then have 14 days to send the defective board. If we don't receive the board within the alloted time, we will bill your card.

If you send the unit in for repair, usually takes 7-10 business days from the date received.

Please provide me your RMA number and serial number so I can see what I can do to help resolve your issue.

You can email me at cl-jeffrey@asus.com

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty USA

Pros: The fan software is cool, but buggy at times.

If you like not booting into windows, random blue screens, and random errors in general......then this board is for you/

Cons: 1) No BIOS seems to work well with this board. And I mean NO BIOS. I have tried every BIOS they have and I still have stability issues. I have had too many failed BIOS to count.


2) I can't even reinstall windows as it blue screen every time.

3) The assist fans are very whinny and annoying.

4) CPU fan error that is a known issue. Why doesn't ASUS fix this!?!?!?!?!?

5) Seems to be a problem with the memory controller. I know its not the memory itself, works fine on another build.

6) Hang-ups on splash screen.

7) Hang-ups after splash screen (dark screen and cannot boot into windows).

8) the clear CMOS does not seem to be working.

9) This is my second board, the first one came with a bent pin. Wow, talk about quality control.

10) Very unhelpful and rude customer support.

There are probably more issues I have encountered, I'm just so full of rage right now about the time I have wasted with this board that I cannot think of them all.

Other Thoughts: I have been a loyal ASUS motherboard customer for over 10 years. But this one might be the last one. Twice in row now this mobo has passed me over. Yes, over the summer I really wanted to troubleshoot motherboards all day. Oh, more time on hold on the phone so I can speak with incompetent customer serve, yes please!

If you search online you will see many other users are having these issues without resolution. "TUF boards that undergo rigorous testing, " yeah right!

But hey, I'm sure you can take a chance......maybe you will actually get one that works.

Now lets wait to see the manufacturers response: "I'm sorry our motherboards are unreliable. If you call our pathetic customer service, I'm sure they can waste more of you time. Maybe if you are lucky you can get yet another RMA for another dysfunctional board. I really hope this response makes this look like an isolated incident to other will give us their money too. Thank you for wasting money on ASUS and we hope you waste money on us in the future."

This loyal ASUS customer of over 10 years might just be done.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you have so many issues with your board. When you said you send the board in for RMA, was this to Newegg or Asus. If this was from Asus, please provide me your RMA number and serial number so I can see what I can do to help resolve your issue.

When it bluescreens, do you get the dump files and use a program that tells you what is actually causing the error.

You can always remove the assist fans if they are annoying.

Never heard of this CPU fan error. I have tested this board and never got a CPU fan error while testing.

Sounds like it may be a heating issue if you say their are hang ups and BSOD appearing.

You can email me at cl-jeffrey@asus.com

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty USA

Pros: Worked decent for almost a year.

Cons: A few months ago I started getting boot errors, network connection errors and other sporadic problems. I went through the usual procedures of checking connections, etc... Tried a new drive and swapped out other parts from another board. Same problem. Odd thing is, the problems with the board are inconsistent.

Other Thoughts: I've been a builder for over 15 years and I've never experienced a problem so frustrating as this one. I have used Asus exclusively but this board has been a very expensive disappointment.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you are starting to experience random issues. Please go to our support site and update to your latest bios and drivers. Don't forget to update the windows updates as well. Please also try to reinstall your OS to see if you are still having issues.

Were you getting BSOD issues so you can see what is actually causing the issues.

Looks like these boards come with a 5 year warranty, so if you want to send the unit in for service our technicians will resolve all issues.

If you have any questions or comments you can email me at cl-jeffrey@asus.com which I reside in the U.S

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey

Pros: ASUS always performs dependably for me. The ASUS AI Suite is outstanding!!!! You can O/C from windows!!!! Happy that ASUS is now including the MB Cooling fans as well!!!

Cons: None at this point!!

Pros: After sending my first one back that would not boot, I have had no problems with the replacement board. Have had the system up and running for about 3 months now and am happy with the board. This was my first build.

Cons: Would have liked a more descriptive manual being that this was my first build. The price of the motherboard could be a little cheaper also.

Other Thoughts: Over all a nice board and the feature set is nice. Thanks to New Egg for prompt service in getting me the new mother board so fast.

Pros: Runs cool, stable, and overclocks easily. Has good bios, features such as thermal armor, thermal monitoring, and much more. Auto-overclocking feature works nicely, since I did not have the time to overclock it yet, and the 2550k i have on it works great even at stock speeds. But with auto OC pushed it to 4.2-4.3 ghz on a very small voltage increase. Even when you switch to the XMP mode and the motherboard detects the 1600mhz ram, the motherboards takes the cpu to 4.1 ghz automatically as well. the motherboard really seems to overclock easily and well.

Also i have not had any issues with heat as it stays nice and cool with the little fans on the board.

Cons: There are two relatively big issues that I do not like with it. First when the Auto-overclock is turned on the ram multiplier is turned on as well, and does not let me pick 1600 mhz, instead what i would have to do is go and change the ram setting to what they were beforehand or pick the closest mhz settings to 1600. Second, and which is my biggest issues, is how much the system has failed to boot up because of "overclocking failed" message at boot up. I have a H80 cooler that I am running with the 2550k and it has been running relatively cool running prime95 for 1hr+. But sometimes when i hit the power button, the case fans and mobo start, stop, start, stop, and start again to go the a message informing me that overclocking has failed. I dont know why that is since the mobo has originally decided on the stable overclock itself, but it looks like when i really want to overclock it and which will happen in the next couple of months, I will have to do it manually and hope that i dont get this message anymore.

But besides that everything has been good.

Other Thoughts: I noticed from the thermal armor temperature readings, that my ram was at like 50-60 C at one point especially after running the system for a long time, with higher room temp, and during gaming. I added a ram fan and it has lowered by Ram temperatures considerably.

But overall a good Motherboard; not sure if worth the premium price tag considering the other asus motherboards will work just as well, but the 5 yr warranty is nice.

Pros: Very Slick design.
Easy to use Bios.
Stays cool.

Cons: Two RAM slots were burned out on arrival, so I was only able to use 16GB's of RAM.
The two mini-fans on the MB are very loud.

Other Thoughts: It's a nice Motherboard for the price, I'm sure there are some other ones that are better, but I would buy this one again.