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my unboxing an overview of one of the physically heaviest motherboards that i
have ever encountered this is the sabertooth z87 from ASUS part of their
tough series or the ultimate force uh which is
the notable things about this is that it really is tough so dust resistant
physically resistant now with some of the armor features that are included and
they come with five year warranties which is
kind of freaking ridiculous for a consumer-grade
motherboard nowadays they are not only
are going to be providing a five-year warranty on these boards but they have significantly upgraded the components
over the last generation tough series so they have
altered the capacitors from 5k to 10k
nichikon caps and not only that
but they have added check this out
a metal back plate to the entire back of the board now what this does is it
improves cooling by a couple degrees it improves the rigidity of the board
significantly this has less flex than any motherboard i've ever encountered
between the thermal armor plastic plate on the front and then
the back plate that covers the entire back of the board and it gives it less
flex for things like heavy CPU coolers as well they've upgraded the vrm
using what what they're calling as good as z77 rog which is not low end stuff by
any stretch of the imagination and they've added some cool new features in
terms of dust resistance that i'm going to cover as soon as we open up this
huge accessory pack here now not only are the components upgraded but ASUS has
also thrown more validation at the board so every single board on a board by
board basis goes through a server grade validation process which means that yeah
if they're gonna throw a five year warranty at it they're pretty sure that it's actually
just not gonna die so let's get into these accessories because there's some
really cool stuff in here that's unique compared to what ASUS offers with their
rog series or their channel series boards first of all we've got a couple
of cooling fans these are optional you don't have to use them but if you do
decide to use them what you can do is you can apply more ventilation under the
thermal armor by putting one of them here where the old sort of northbridge
location would be and then another one out the back this allows you to directly
exhaust air out of your computer that has been used to cool down the mosfet
cooling that is beefy and ample and you
can kind of see it if you look in there don't worry too much about it it's down there but it's covered up by that
plastic thermal armor coating next accessory is
a little ventilation piece so this makes the back panel look a little bit more
appealing so you don't just see the fan hanging out the back of your computer
thermal probes three thermal probes are included and what's really cool is that
the software that is specific to tough
series boards allows you to set up your thermal probes say what they're for you
can name them you can assign profiles detect all of your fans and rpms fan
expert 2 is still very much implemented on this board
and it'll set everything up for you and allow you to optimize it in such a way
that your system stays very very cool you can also use the software to quickly
at a glance see if there are any problem areas in your computer where things are
overheating because it's all about reliability with this board they've also
included even more dust covers than
before now traditionally on tough series boards we've got pci express dust covers
as well as ddr3 slot dust covers now we
even get dust covers for connectors on the back
we get dust covers for SATA ports
and we get dust covers for like check this out you even get dust
covers for stuff that's not even included in your motherboard like a dvi
port dust cover so very very very cool stuff if you live
in a rugged environment or you're like you're taking your gaming pc to like a
military base or something like that yeah get one of these
which leads us to the board physically so you got your thermal radar software
and all that cool stuff but if you can't connect really cool things to it then ultimately you're not going to care too
much so your 8-pin CPU connector is up in the top left in its ideal location
and you got three four excuse me four
fan connectors up there one of which is their new patent-pending design that
detects whether you're using a three pin or a four pin fan you've got four ddr3
slots along the right hand edge another fan connector so that's a total of five
so far your 24 pin connector on the right hand edge in its ideal location
your usb 3 connector in its ideal
ideal lure more ideal than ideal location on the right hand edge because
it's right angle love right angle usb 3 connectors
six SATA three six gigabit per second ports off of the Intel controller and
then two more off a third-party controller down at the bottom of the
board you've got your front panel connector a fifth and sixth fan header
as well as two usb 2.0 headers a trusted platform module as well as a Thunderbolt
header and a clear cmos jumper your pci
express slot layout is pretty bog standard so you've got three PCIe 1x
slots two p are three PCIe 16x slots
which will run at 16x or 8x8x and then this one runs at 4x
regardless now these guys right here are little vents that give you a couple
of different options for cooling so check this out you can slide these back
and forth so you can see that sliding action there so you can either take more
airflow from a an active CPU cooling solution so for
example if you had a downdraft fan you'd want to open these up so you can get
more cooling to the vrm heatsinks however if you were using liquid cooling
for example and you weren't going to get any benefit from additional airflow then
instead you can close them which will allow you to hook up these fans that i
talked about before here and here and take full advantage of those fans
without wasting any of that airflow going out towards the CPU socket so who
is this board for it's for people who want the ultimate in reliability the
ultimate in cooling you know is it an overclocking board yeah of course i mean
just because something's not rog doesn't mean that it's not gaming just because
something's not an extreme grade rog board doesn't mean it's not optimal for
overclocking this is for people who might not upgrade as often or even
people who might be using it as in say for example more of like a workstation a
value workstation environment where you want that reliability and that build
quality but you don't need all the bells and whistles of a true workstation grade
board for i o on the back things are pretty standard with four usb 2.0 ports
four usb 3.0 ports supporting uasp a BIOS flashback button two e SATA ports
optical audio out as well as HDMI and displayport ports an Intel powered
gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 audio out
and if any of you noticed that this board had a CPU in it uh they don't all
come with that mine was hand packed by jj with a with a hand-picked 4770k so i
could really see what the platform was capable of and so yours will come with
the usual protective cover
over the CPU socket not with an actual CPU in it sorry to crush your hopes like
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