Hmmm, I bought the Sabertooth 990FX after my M4A77D went poof. (Much to my surprise and joy Asus repaired the 77D under warranty so that board will go back to work as a video server)
I choose it because I fly flight simulations. These programs tend to be very CPU intensive. I had read about the new Bulldozer chips (on order) and I wanted a board that was built specifically for the Bulldozer.
Some of the equipment came from the older board's build, like the Palit 560Ti 2GB. The M4A77D is a single PCIe slot so I bought a GPU with 2GB of RAM to handle the large textures found in the Digital Combat Series A-10C Warthog and KA-50 Black Shark simulations. As the Sabertooth had multiple slots, I thought to go SLI which meant buying a similar card.
The DDR2 from the old board was a no go for the Sabertooth. I contacted G Skill and they recommended the Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Model F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXL. The Sabertooth board with the AMD Phenom II CPUs has not been easy to configure with four sticks of RAM. Initially it simply wouldn't boot with four sticks. With Raja and others help AND the new BIOS I was finally able to get the board stable with four sticks of RAM. The pre-boot self-testing takes over a minute but the board boots up stable every time. The Bulldozer has a completely different memory manager on die than the Phenom series. I will let everyone know if it will tolerate things like overclocking better.
Hint: If you build this board without a Bulldozer CPU and want to run four sticks of RAM, be sure to check with the RAM manufacturer on compatibility. When I purchased this Asus had not published a QVL for memory. Build the system, install ONE stick of RAM in slot closest to CPU, after OS load and ALL drivers updated to latest then update to latest BIOS. Reboot directly into BIOS and follow Raja's memory guide (
http://www.asusrog.com/forums/showthread.php?3468-Crosshair-V-Formula-Easy-Memory-Setup-Guide&highli...) and read the BIOS guide (
http://www.asusrog.com/forums/showthread.php?2585-ASUS-Crosshair-V-Formula-BIOS-Guide-Overclocking).
The Sabertooth and nVidia SLI is not quite ready for prime time. It is important to use the latest nVidia drivers, 285 series or later. For reasons that escape me, you have to load the drivers twice to get a functional SLI system. The pair of 560Tis is fairly fast although for the money I could have bought a single 580 and probably had a cooler running system.
Speaking of heat, the thermal radar is a very interesting addition to the AISuite. I remain unconvinced of its accuracy but it certainly provides lots of information about the relative temperatures across the motherboard. The case I am using has five case fans shown below.
Fan size Location Airflow
80mm bottom case front panel across hard drives Inlet
80mm rear case below PSU, behind CPU Exhaust
80mm side case, over PCIe 1 Inlet
80mm side case, over PCIe 2 Inlet
120mm top case, in front of PSU Exhaust
Despite relatively massive airflow, the motherboard and components run fairly hot from my experience. My old M4A77D with four sticks of DDR2, same CPU, and only two fans ran 10 degrees cooler across the board.
In all I think this is a good board with great potential. If you want to buy cutting edge be prepared to bleed a bit:) They 990 boards are the future with Bulldozer and Bulldozer II. Every few years I seem to forget the headaches associated with buying bleeding edge. My old rule used to be wait for four BIOS ROM revisions before buying a board. That would be a good rule for this board too.
Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
System specs: Asus Sabertooth 990FX, AMD FX 4170, 16GB dual channel DDR3 16000 RAM, 2 x Palit 560Ti 2GB video cards in SLI, 2 x WD Raptors 70GB RAID 0 array (System), Corsair 64GB SSHD (Sims), 2 x Hitachi 200GB RAID 1 array (Data), TIR 4, Auria 26" main display, HP 21.5" Helios touch display, XKeys Pro panel, Copy Cat Controls w/ custom cyclic/collective/rudder
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