welcome to my unboxing of a surprisingly heavy motherboard the Sabertooth x79 has
an extremely heavy box and I'm not 100%
sure oh man oops I wonder what that is
uh I'm not 100% sure why that would be but let's get into this board so it has
it is a tough series board TUF the Ultimate Force Series board with a 5year
warant guarantee guaranteed reliability terms and conditions May apply um PCI
Express 3.0 compatibility this is an x79
board which means it is compatible with all of Intel's latest LGA 2011
processors it is compatible with Crossfire X and SLI and when we open it
up we'll find a bunch of cool stuff so we've got thermal armor total air flow
boosting heat dissipation so that is uh the cooler okay thermal radar real time
temp detection and heat removal oh okay so okay monitors
temperatures and critical parts of the motherboard in real time automatically adjusting fan speeds to make sure the
main system maintains High stability without overheating oh that's kind of
neat automatically calculates ideal fan speeds based on different parameters
selected by users for each component keeping everything cooler and longer lasting neat new Digi plus power control
so this is something that they implemented on x79 is an allnew Digi
plus power control so that is digital power control for both the CPU and the
dam very cool tough components s certified by military standard okay
robust chokes capacitors and mosfet certified through third party military
grade testing oh their SSD caching is supported so if you don't have an ocz
synapse drive and if you don't have a z68 chipset to use in SRT you can use
this on ausus x79 boards that support this feature usb3 boost allows you to
use devices with uasp that is a faster way of interfacing with usb3 drives
finally USB BIOS flashback which is the
smartest thing that I've pretty much ever seen on a motherboard ever because
it allows you without any components installed that is no CPU and no RAM
installed to flash the BIOS just using a
USB drive with the BIOS file loaded on it holy smokes right that means if Intel
releases a new CPU and we have old inventory in our warehouse at NC and we
ship you the new CPU that the board doesn't support yet and the old
inventory board which is the same board but just with a different firmware
revision and you plug it in and it doesn't work you go oh no my system's
DOA and then ASUS says oh no there's a firmware update there's a BIOS update
and then you go well I don't have another CPU now it no longer matters
that's so cool cuz it means it's reducing end User rmas it's reducing end
user Hassle and it's better for the retailers and the manufacturers
everybody wins with that feature very cool CPU installation guide cool tough
stickers IO Shield user guide including
a useless DVD inside which you should download the latest off the ASUS website
tough series motherboard 5year warranty notice as well as a certificate of
reliability included accessories are
four SATA 36 GB per second cables two SATA 3 6 G SATA 2 3 gbit per second
cables uh front Q connectors a
fan which probably go somewhere and an
SLI connector that is a very short SLI bridge I have a feeling I'm not going to
like the PCI Express slot spacing on this board um I mean the reality of it
is 99% of people still are not using
dual graphics cards even when they buy high-end boards so you know I'm not
going to get my panties too much in a not about it but you know how it is see
that's funny why would they do that oh okay I guess that's okay why does this
looks so short to me okay never mind it's okay that's fine that's uh that's
that's definitely adequate spacing all right so this is looking like a pretty
slick little board here why don't we go ahead and take these stickers off I
already talked about all those things except the UEFI bio does have a UEFI
BIOS which just means it's a graphical user interface you can use your mouse
rather than just uh the keyboard to navigate it and let's start on the back
cuz I felt something interesting back there yes we have a heat sink on the vrm
components on the back of the board we've also got our standard LGA 2011
back plate which makes it much much easier for manufacturers to design
awesome aftermarket cooling solutions for this board that are going to be
retained in a way that is not going to have them fall off and put adequate
mounting pressure onto the CPU I love seeing that back plate built in it's a
higher quality decision thank you Intel notus that was Intel um right right
right on that note okay uh oh you know what it's too far away but something to
consider if you're buying an x79 board is you might want to think about getting
a case such as the antech 1100 which has a fan on the back that will allow you to
actively cool these components on the back of the board as well as the back of
the PCB itself because a lot of heat radiates out of the back of a mother
board PCB so now let's have a look at the overall layout so you got your LGA
2011 socket ASUS much to their pride has
implemented 8 dim slots on all of their x79 boards and kudos to them because
they have gone with the full x79 solution rather than just putting on
four dim slots which is still quad Channel by the way I've had people
complain about x79 boards um including this one I think there's a comment on
the video for this board right here saying oh why only dual Channel memory
on an x79 board it's not dual Channel memory it's quad Channel memory four
dims quad Channel memory um it's just
whether or not you can actually put two dims per Channel okay guys so this one
supports two dims for channel eight dims total I don't have that many fingers um
for up to 64 gigs of memory using currently available stuff very neat
eight pin connector and its ideal location along the top left edge of the
board we've got a pretty good looking cooler over here but the key part is
this heat pipe right here which leads to an even better cooler
over here so there's a fan which can be installed by taking out those screws and
putting in the fan here which is going to give you better cooling for your vrm
components and I would highly recommend installing that because this is a very
limited amount of space to cool the voltage or the power delivery circuitry
for a very power hungry CPU we've got a memo K button which allows you to boot
with pretty much any memory off the Hop as long as it's functional 24 pin
connector in its ideal location front USB 3 header in its ideal location I've
started calling that that we've got all the Intel SATA ports so these are your
SATA 36 GB per second ports there's your 4 SATA 2 3 GB per second ports as well
as running off a third party Marvel controller these are the ones that
support SSD caching so that's where You' plug your SSD and your hard drive into
and those are also SATA 3 6 gbit per second let's go ahead and move over here
there's your front panel ports there's your clear seimos although I hope there's one on the back panel yes there
no there is not yes there no there is
not fascinating okay uh well there's your clear
cosos huh there isn't another one okay uh there's your front usb2 four of those
also got your front panel audio and then your PCI Express slot layout so yeah
like I said this is not what I thought it was it's okay I thought it was 1 two
3 but actually it's one 2 3 4 and then
the other one there's one more space so if you did want to do a three-way configuration this is probably not the
ideal board for it because those ones would have the tighter space but this
one is best optimized for two I also see
their uh their TPU so what that means is that this board supports their automated
overclocking which if you check out on my ncixcom channel their automated
overclocking utility absolutely blows away the competitor's overclocking
utilities with the uh one button setup
blows away their competitor's one button overclocking utilities because it
achieved a much higher overclock and it was still stable um what else we got here 16x 16x
8x in case you guys were wondering one PCI slot although I don't really know
what that's doing on such a high-end board two PCI e1x slots and let's have a
look at what we got for Io on the back here we go we got a PS2 keyboard mouse
combo Port I still like seeing these they are still handy 1 2 3 4 USB 3.0
ports 1 2 3 4 5 USB 2.0 ports a fire
wire Port e that's powered eat that's regular e SATA we've got optical audio
out as well as the USB flashback Port right there gigabit Ethernet and 7.1
audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the tough
series x79 saber-tooth board from ASUS and don't forget to subscribe to Linus
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