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Tips on Sabertooth Z77?

Dadofamunky

Dadofamunky

Platinum Member
Getting ready to rebuild my system around an Asus Sabertooth Z77; just wanted to consult the community about any tips, things to watch out for. Ditching my now-ancient P67 first-gen motherboard for something more modern. Looks like a big winner. I know the UEFI BIOS without a problem. Anyone else got any thoughts on this? Looking forward to any input.
 
TBH, you're wasting your money. Z77 doesn't bring anything new vs P67 except for chipset usb3 and pci-e 3.0, but you need a new cpu for that as well.
 
Just have a magnetic screwdriver ready.

The thermal armor can get in the way of some of the mobo screws and if you have big hands like me it can be a bit difficult. So during my build I ran out a got a magnetic tipped screwdriver and problem solved.

Other than that...the small screamer fans are a waste. I keep them on quiet mode or off and dont really notice much of a temp difference, but I have good fans/airflow otherwise so that helps.
 
Right about the magnetic screwdriver. That was an issue with the screws closest to the edge of the board where it conjoins with the case. Of course being a doofus I don't have one. Things worked out OK in the end.

Damn, this board is excellent. Once I figured out that I had to start off booting with only the SSD connected, everything went flawlessly and only a few drivers needed to be loaded. Back in business 100% and I'm running Prime at 4.2 GHz as an initial OCing pass. I'm actually considering water now. I think it's worth it to spend more money to get a higher-end board with the better capacitors and MOSFETs with a longer warranty. My old board had an electrical fault that left it crashing pretty frequently (due to an OCing overvolt screwup). The UEFI BIOS also seems a lot more solid now, compared to the first-generation P67 board I had, which really was a piece of crap.

They provide a couple of 40mm fans (screamers as C2Bcool says) for specific parts of the board, which is nice. I'm using them and you know, they're pretty dang quiet. Asus also provides inserts for empty slots to keep dust out of those too. At least eight fan headers by my count as well. *Never* seen that many in any consumer board I've ever used.

Oh, even better: It saw and used my old RAID array without any issue at all! Unbelievable! From the old P67 chipset to the Z77 chipset, the Raid 0 pair I had kicked up perfectly once I set the BIOS. Intel RAID is the shizzle.
 
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Dadofamunky said:
They provide a couple of 40mm fans (screamers as C2Bcool says) for specific parts of the board, which is nice. I'm using them and you know, they're pretty dang quiet. Asus also provides inserts for empty slots to keep dust out of those too. At least eight fan headers by my count as well. *Never* seen that many in any consumer board I've ever used.

Oh, even better: It saw and used my old RAID array without any issue at all! Unbelievable! From the old P67 chipset to the Z77 chipset, the Raid 0 pair I had kicked up perfectly once I set the BIOS. Intel RAID is the shizzle.
Click to expand...

+1 on the raid (raid 0 installed, almost felt like plug and play: very easy).

I found the 40mm fans supplied are responsible for the most persistent sound in my system (they are not loud, but fairly irritating). I only permit them to spin up once everything else is up to speed. Not actually sure if they are that essential to the cooling process.

One thing that caught me out on the fan controller, is it all runs off the *mobo* temperature sensors. Don't trust the cpu temp reading in the fan controller (there are two other obscurely named sensors that I use to control cpu speed). I don't know if this was obvious for you guys, but took me a while to figure out why the fans were not spinning up correctly under load.
 
Hmmmm. for some reason mine are spinning up correctly and things get noticeably louder as I load the Prime test, without doing any sensor deployment. Haven't finished my full OC yet, hope and expect to finish up at 4.5G. Added another case fan which drove temps down by 4-5C.
 
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