so today I'll be unboxing the ASUS Sabertooth
55i and this is yet another high-end p55
motherboard from ASUS so this is not part of their Republic of Gamers Brand
This is actually a new gaming brand from ASUS the Ultimate Force or tough get it
the ultimate yeah okay so features on this board we've got a lot of the usual
ASUS high-end features but we also have some new ones first of all is Ceramics
heat sink design so basically
the oh oh okay they're coating the heat sinks with ceramic which apparently
gives them better heat disspation okay cool M fan frame you can attach a fan to
your memory slots for better cooling okay efficient switching design oh tough
caps and mosfets okay so there's more information on this inside but that
means that they're tough okay we'll get more into that later temp probes Drive
expert and memo okay their technology for making sure that even high-end
memory will post okay as long as you press this button it'll set it it to a
safe setting so this is a Windows 7 ready board it supports LGA
1156 CPUs that means core i7 or core i5
CPUs so as soon as we get this box open we see the board itself which we're
going to get to after the accessory package so inside the accessory package
we have an IO Shield okay there you go
IO Shield we have one IDE cable so we
can assume based on that that there is an IDE port on this motherboard we have
the Q connect which are colorcoded with the tough color scheme rather than the
traditional blue and white kind of nice touch there uh then we have what is this
oh this is the fan bracket to attach a fan to your memory modules it doesn't
actually include the fan itself though then we have an SLI Bridge Okay the
crossfire bridge should be included with your video card if you need one then we
have two USB and one eata on a little PCI back plate six SATA cables three of
which are right angle and three of which are just straight connectors and
then last but not least we have a user guide along with your driver CD and then
even Laster but not leaster you have a certificate of reliability that's kind
of cute okay so your capacitors are thermal shock tested moisture resistance
tested salt spray tested cuz that'll be useful solder ability test solder bath
test vibration test mechanical shock test and the mosfets all have a bunch of
tests too wow okay so let's get this
board open now you know maybe some people like this but
the first thing that comes to my mind is oh man that is the ugliest color scheme
I've seen on an ASUS board since they were using that cardboard colored PCB it
is meant to be very military looking so this is the kind of thing you'd expect
to find like strapped to the side of a tank I guess okay so let's go over the
basic features of this board first of all let's do the power
connector so we have our 24 pin power along the right Edge just where it's
supposed to be then we've got an 8 Pin power connector up at the top now while
I'm here I guess I can check out these heat sinks so the heat sinks have what
looks like kind of a fine fur and that's the ceramic coating on them that
apparently really helps with heat dissipation so for the CPU socket we
have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 plus two
phases for the CPU and then a couple phases for the memory as well up at the
top we have an overvolt RAM button
that's kind of cool to see and then we've got the memo okay button here as
well as an LED indicator for your RAM this heat sink down here is also
Ceramics up okay we got four SATA ports
on the side so four right angle SATA ports and then we have four more at the
top so the black ones are all controlled by the p55 chipset whereas the orange
and white ones are controlled by a j Micron chipset like many high-end boards
we've got onboard power and reset switches although not an onboard clear
SEO switch you have to actually set the jumper for that right here
okay so we got two PCI Express 16x slots which run in 8X 8X mode if you are using
two cards and then we have three additional PCI e1x and two PCI slots
something really cool that I just noticed about this board is it has an
awful lot of four pin fan connectors oh
actually no not really okay it has two four pin fan connectors so two pwm fan
connectors but it has a lot of other three pins okay so let's have a look at
the io on the back we got two PS2 ports
eight USB ports one optical audio out
ESAT fire wire 1 GB Ethernet I'm
surprised to see only 1 GB Ethernet although I mean I've never really
understood why you need more than one on a on a consumer level board 7.1 audio
and something I wanted to observe about
this particular board is that I have finally found something that matches the
no to a color scheme thank you for checking out my video blog