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13 of 13 persons found the following review helpful.
Good choice for the AMD Phenom II x6
By J. S. Green
Overall, I find this board to be very well constructed, simple to install, splendid 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 innovative BIOS choices concede just in regards to 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 likewise a commodious “clear BIOS” button on the board, in case you REALLY goof it up.
Many of the board parts are tested to “MIL SPEC”, which means military standards. They will survive higher than normal temperature conditions and still work. Many constituents are covered with special materials for extra cooling, and metal parts have micro sized distortions (like the dimples on a golf ball), which develop more cooling area, and therefore better efficiency.
The manual is very good and rather clear. Along these lines, the internetlocation 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 general sound & etc. There are an further and added 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 in truth nice feature (for the system builder) is that there is a little 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 more comfortable 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 initial set the BIOS to “IDE”. For Windows 7 users, there is a way to change the registry to enable ACHI (google it). This is not important if the former 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 may look inside and see which light is lit, saving a lot of trouble shooting time.
There are various nice utilities that run underneath windows (I’m on Win 7 Pro). These concede one to set respective settings, and view data with regards to the board status. One worthful 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 grant one to alter the boot image, so you may put your bestloved 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 selective information 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 for the most part because I am employed to older BIOS.
The board is designed around the AMD 990 chipset, but they chose to comprise the bequest SATA (two ports on board and the three ESATA ports on the back) by way of a dissimilar chipset from Jmicron inc. It is a bit strange to see the Jmicron looking for gadgets 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 frequent is backwards compatible, but perhaps that is just the easiest way for them to do it. Not actually a “con”, but surprising in such an progressed board.
I have not yet managed to get the AMD “cool n quiet” feature of the Phenom II x6 to work. I suppose there is a heap of way to modify the settings to concede it (I have already enabled it in the modern BIOS), but either my computer is always using the cores, or the motherboard merely isn’t invoking it. Actually, this CPU runs cool sufficient that I may not pursue it further. EDIT: OK, the board utilities indicate that the CPU cores are using Cool N Quiet, but CoreTemp monitoring is not showing it.
The board has a bequest serial connector on the board, but no serial port on the back. There is a mouse port, but if you actually need serial (9 pin or other), you will need an adaptor card.
Overall, the board works great out of the box or with altered settings. Recommended.
4 of 4 humans found the following review helpful.
Runs Linux Like a Champ!
By electronics guy
Just so people know, even with the noise not so long ago when it comes to UEFI BIOS only permitting OEM Microsoft productions to boot, this board runs Linux like a champ. I don’t believe this version of UEFI BIOS even supports the boot effigy signing but it might in the future with an update. Either way, if it does get added, it must grant disabling that feature so other OSes besides Winderz may 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 makers use Windows-based BIOS upgrade apps or you have to boot from a diskette. This board allows you to grab a BIOS effigy from a USB drive and do the update in the BIOS itself. Nice.
Overall quality looks great. The power supply division is low profile so a large total of cooling solutions ought to 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 must be set for a heap of time.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
OpenSUSE 12.1 needs network driver update to work right…
By Craig Arno
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 with regards to 7 minutes. Everything works except the RTC8111E based network adapter [and later I ran into 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 a good deal of 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 rectify 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 set up with a Static IP address worked well sufficient to download the 8168 driver from Realtek.
This board likewise worked fine with Windows 7 Enterprise x64.
I exceptionally 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 employed a ($160) Kingwin 550W supply with power element of 1.0 and Plus 80 “Platinum” rating so this new box will run as expeditiously as possible (92%) over the next 5 years… the power savings even at $0.08/KWH will recompense for the supply in 5 years. Read reviews of these new furnishes as “modified sine-wave” UPS’s may have to be substituted with more highpriced sine-wave output UPS to function correctly with newer high efficacy supplies.
Update 7-JAN-2012
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I encountered two more difficultnesses 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 permitted OpenSUSE 12.1 x64 to recognize all USB widgets 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 grant me to set up 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 beneath 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 effigy from ASUS web website 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 almost 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, regarding 10 seconds later the scheme 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 necessitated to enter set up 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 difficulties were solved by a 0901 BIOS upgrade!
And I’m using this new scheme to update this review. With 6 processors and x64 Linux, this scheme is lightning fast (even Firefox and Chrome load in the blink of an eye from the Solid State Disk-SSD)!
Now that I recognise everything works, I’ll finish scheme setup and order another board for hardware backup. What I’ve learned over decades of computing is motherboard designs only last in regards to 3-6 months. So if you need a drop in substitute for something critical [like a SOHO server system], buy the second motherboard after you recognise this configuration is going to work. I genuinely had an older ASUS board fail once and this doctrine minimized my down-time and frustration. Failures seldom occur at commodious times.
Update 17-JAN-2012
==================
I went to order a second system a few days ago and encountered the Phenom II x6 1100T processor is no longer available. AMD set the end of life on these processors for Dec 2011. The AMD web website is a mess for figuring this stuff out, so a day of exploration which included hard technical data and client reviews to come up with the answer I needed. The AMD FX-8120 8-core processor is a suitable substitute for most apps if you have an AM3+ socket board. The Sabertooth 990fx is an AM3+ is such a critter.
From the reviews I read, the Phenom II processor is a better number cruncher, and the FX is a better selective information mover. Since I need both, the FX chip will go in the server since that needs scads of threading and not much number crunching. In the development system, I’ll use the Phenom II x6 I in the first place bought. So it turned out well, and the Sabertooth 990fx motherboard after a month of use is still a winner!
If any individual is mesmerized I also found a G-Force ASUS GT-520 video card for around $50 which does 1080p HD in hardware, runs two monitors, and is supposed to work well with Linux. It also doesn’t have a fan, so no extra noise!
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