We have told you about Asus’ design choices for the Sabertooth P67 and even gone into some detail about the mindset behind this and other products in the TUF line. However all of the best design choices and components in the world will not make a board perform. To get great performance takes a little more. In this half of our Sabertooth review we are going to look into that side of the product. Asus has always had a reputation for tinkering with their BIOSes (not always a good one though). So let’s start off there and see where it takes us.
Section III - Performance Tests, Real-World Here we have two tests that are designed to put the performance of the motherboard and its subsystems to the test. Both require good CPU, Memory, HDD and even to a lesser extent audio and network performance. The two tests we chose were Lightwave 3D 9.6 and AutoGK 2.55. We will be adding at least one more real-world test to this battery in the near future, but for now these two cover quite a bit.Lightwave 3D 9.6 x64 -Lightwave is another industry standard application for 3D animation and rendering. It has a large tool base and the rendering engine is highly threaded (when using the right render model). This application is also capable of expanding to 4k resolutions as well as ray tracing for rending the light sources. For our testing we use frame 470 of the Pinball scene found in the LW 9 Content folder. This uses the newer perspective camera that is better suited to a multi-CPU/Core environment. This camera style also uses ray tracing and a much improved anti-aliasing method. Settings are shown below in the attached screen shot. Of course these are single frame renders and they are not a complete picture; for that you have to take into account the number of frames an average project would have. In a typical 30 second commercial you will have around 840 to 960 frames (at 28 – 32 FPS) this means that you have to multiply the time of a single frame by that number just to get a vague idea of how long that 30 seconds would take. This is because each frame will have a different render time based on complexity.If you did not already have enough evidence that the Sabertooth is great for workstation style applications our Lightwave 3D testing should clue you in. The Sabertooth did a great job at rendering our 4k frame. Our project times are a reflection of what we see in the single fram rendersAutoGK 2.55 Transcoding -AutoGK is a transcoding software that is really multiple parts combined to make an easy to use whole. It combines, items like FDD Show, Xvid encoder, Virtual Dub and others for use in converting one media format to another (usually Xvid AVI). It will not transcode copy protected DVDs or Bluray discs yet (you still need a decrypter for that). But it does an excellent job on everything else. For our testing we use a 2 hour movie that has been placed onto a standard definition DVD for playback; we then transcode this DVD to a 100% quality AVI with the original audio intact. This puts a strain on the CPU, Memory, HDD and the attached DVD ROM drive.The results here are the same as we have seen in just about every other test we have run. The Sabertooth comes out on top at stock speeds and a close second when we push it.
