CONCLUSION
If you’re checking out this review, chances are you’re banking on an AMD setup so we’ll put aside the choice of processors in our closing segment. As we’ve mentioned in the beginning, we’re shedding more light to this product and by that we intend to give more insight into what should be top considerations for any buyer regardless of product.
As an IT professional, I’m usually obligated to propose projects that provide the lowest TCO and highest ROI. TCO is Total Cost of Ownership and ROI is Return of Investment. Any and all IT pros will have had the experience of revamping proposals that get turned down by CFOs because their acquisition cost is too steep. As is always the case, this situation is mostly circumvented by presenting the most cost-effective solutions. SME-segment IT folks will most likely go for DIY solutions rather than enterprise and this is where consumer products meet with enterprise-level requirements.
Let’s break down some of this business lingo. First, we have Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Aside from acquisition cost (purchase cost) there are still costs to consider aside from what we originally pay for a product. TCO includes the following:
- Purchase Cost – purchase price of the product. We’ll go with current street prices.
- Operating Cost – power consumption. We’ll go by our current specs and average power draw and compound it for 8hrs/300days operation. Average electrical cost is Php9/KWh.
- Maintenance Cost – cleaning, maintenance, troubleshooting. We’ll consolidate all prices to one service charge equivalent to the average service fee of a “PC technician†which is Php500.
Now we insert the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 into the equation:
The poorly-cut table above illustrates the factors included in purchasing a system on the first year. We take this data and consolidate them, deducting power-saving and value-adding features from the total cost where they appear and compound the total acquisition cost (CAPEX), operating expense and maintenance (OPEX) as the total TCO for the first year. At a glance, value-adding features can really amount to a whole lot of savings and ASUS’ features make it so. We’ve taken into consideration that the competing high-end model does not share such power-efficiency technologies and others in favor of other features that cannot be quantified as value-adding.
Now we tabulate the data on a 5-year life-cycle. We’ll factor in CPU upgrade after 3 years and with only the board cost as the primary value, then electrical expense and maintenance cost. It is assumed that the system is serviced every quarter and that the system will incur repair post-warranty also quarterly.
Here is another cost model featuring a popular high-end 990FX motherboard which features a lower acquisition cost but only has a 2 year warranty.
The line-graph clearly and easily illustrates what is the total cost of ownership of our motherboard versus the competition on a five-year life cycle model. Anyone who’s really into prolonging their system will find that having a motherboard with a longer warranty will surely increase the value and decrease total cost of ownership. The savings can easily go into other things like another component upgrade.
So in closing, the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 and its TUF brothers go far beyond the performance segment and rewards the user with quality and value that shows. We really didn’t have any idea on how to go about reviewing this product so we went with the thing it excels at and that’s value. We can go about it by putting the system inside our torture room but in a more realistic sense, the intended consumers of this product along with any other product would be those that want a prolonged service life with minimal hidden costs.
ASUS surely believes in their craftsmanship and the 5-year warranty alone on the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 is a testament to their trust in their work. People in our position can easily become performance snobs but we at Back2Gaming prefer to look things at a value-oriented perspective and the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 claims the title of Value Award as well as our top recommendation.