Overclocking
Overclocking on the Z87 Sabertooth is pretty easy, even if you are a beginner. Although ASUS does not include any Windows-based overclocking tools with this motherboard so everything will have to be done in the BIOS.
When you are in the BIOS go to Advanced Mode and the Ai Tweaker tab. Scroll down to OC Tuner. You can either select Ratio First or BCLK First. Ratio first will try to overclock the system using the CPU Core Ratio and BCLK first will try and overclock the system using the BCLK first. This is easy instant overclocking for beginners. So how did it do?
Using ratio mode it brought us up from the Core i7-4770K’s stock speed of 3.5 GHz up to 4.1 GHz.
BCLK mode did a little bit better. It changed the BCLK from 100 MHz to 125 MHz and gave us an overclock of 4.25 Ghz.
Of course our overclocking was not done from there. We went ahead and did our own overclocking by adjusting the core ratio. I was able to get the system to boot all the way up at 4.9 GHz, but during load the chip just got too hot. I settled on a stable overclock of 4.6 GHz. This was only because of the thermals of the chip. We are using a 240mm Asetek watercooler and the chip was still hot.
In Japan this (pretty good) board (with over a dozen software updates online already [complicating things]) only gets a ONE YEAR Warranty; via the Official Amazon ASUS Retailer.
I bought one and went to register it in English (and to join the owners club for added content); but was refused as there is no registration code. ASUS will not supply us in Japan/Asia with a 5-year warranty on paper (there is NO WARRANTY CARD supplied with the board as you get in USA/Europe/Australia/New Zealand/Canada/Russia etc).
We are discriminated against as customers/consumers?
They wrote to me and indicated that `IF` there is an international problem with the boards that I might have the right to claim a replacement board during the five years; but that would be difficult to process.
We get a ONE Year LIMITED Warranty here.
The Official ASUS Amazon retailer actually only provides a ONE MONTH IMMEDIATE REPLACEMENT WARRANTY if the board fails.
After that we have to go to ASUS direct; and that is hard; due to customers getting NO WARRANTY CARD and NO REGISTRATION Number.
So; the MARKETING IS MISLEADING.
They blamed me for reading in English on an English site for any oversight (via e-mails).
If you can read chinese~Japanese KANJI they may have their claims on ASUS Japan; but I dont read the near impossible; especially anything technical that fluent Japanese mostly cannot understand in computing either.