today we're going to be unboxing the ASUS Sabertooth x58 motherboard this is
part of their the Ultimate Force or tough series of boards so let's talk a
little bit about what makes the tough series special number one not this number one
is tough components certified by military standards so they are using the
most hardcore components possible to ensure that this board lasts for as long
as possible and they do back it up ausa's standard motherboard warranty is
3 years whereas this particular tough series board has a 5year warranty which
is pretty outstanding so let's talk a little bit about some of the other
special things about the tough series it has camix heat sink coating Tech which
in theory allows better cooling than a purely metal heat sink we also have
efficient switching power design so that means optimal power efficiency all right
many assus boards do feature technology like that for optimizing power
efficiency but this particular one is tough evidently we have sat 6 gbit per
second USB 3.0 memo K which is a feature I have talked about quite a bit in the
past so I'm not going to go too far into that as well as Aus Q design so you got
a q Shield which means that you can easily put in the motherboard from the
back and you're not going to bend pieces of metal into your slots you've also got
Q connectors which I believe we have talked about and uh actually some of
these I'm not familiar with o q dim right that's the quick installation dim
so I'll I'll show you that when we actually look at the board itself and
then maybe I can even figure out what the other ones are ah here we go yes
5year warranty notice look at that it's in many different languages too here is
the motherboard user guide including a powered by Aus sticker and a disc that
you shouldn't use you should download the latest uh utilities and drivers from
the assus website here's a certificate of reliability check that out they it's
certified reliable so test method 100 thermal
shock test look at this so these are all
military standard tests they're running on this thing on the chokes mosfets and
capacitors H that's pretty neat actually
okay then we have uh two SATA 6 GB per second cables and two
SATA 3 GB per second cables please note
these are identical cables except for the white on the 6 GB per second ones
they do not perform differently we have an SLI Bridge we have the assus Q
connector as well as the Q shield with the fuzzy foam on the back
all right let's have a look at the board itself now the look of this board is a
bit love and hate uh not everybody loves it but lots of people do because it's a
very U military themed look so you've
that means you've got military greens military camouflage style Browns you've
got a black PCB which is definitely a must for a high-end board these days and
then you've also got a lot of black components as well so let's look at the layout overall of the board first of all
you've got what appears to be an 8+2 power design around your LGA 1366 socket
you've got a fair amount of room around the socket for aftermarket coolers
and yeah I think that's pretty much all there is to say about the socket itself
you've got an eight pin power connector up here in its ideal location and I've
been asked about this a few times but this little cover is in case you do not
have an 8 Pin power connector on your power supply you can just plug in four
but if you have an eight pin use it you've got support for up to 24 gigs of
DDR3 memory in triple Channel mode so you want to populate the light brown
ones first and then the dark brown one second that is a limitation of the core
i7 memory controller this board does support up to six Core 980x Extreme
Edition processor over here on the right we have our 24 pin power connector in
its ideal location and right here we have the memo button so that means that
no matter what the memory will post so it'll find a very very safe setting
allow you to post with your memory and then tweak the settings from there let's
keep moving down the board we have SATA 6 GB per second which actually isn't
here it's here so those ones that are white colored those are your SATA 6 GB
per second and the black ones are SATA 3 gbit per second let's talk a little bit
about the Ceramics which you can see is right here so that's this kind of
sandpapery feeling coating on all of the heat sinks on this board I don't know if
it makes it cool better because I haven't like I don't have an identical
board with identical heat sinks to test against but I guess in theory it does
and ultimately it looks pretty cool so uh I mean the x58 doesn't even get that
hot anyway so it couldn't really matter one way or the other but looks great I
think check that out those are cool heat
sinks all right so let's keep going around so here's our front panel
connectors here's our clear seos button we have three PCI Express slots on this
particular board so your SLI slots are going to be these two that's why you did
have a short SLI Bridge included so when you're using both of these in 16x mode
my assumption is this one's going to run in 4X mode just like on all x58
motherboards you do have one PCI slot but as soon as you install a graphics
card that's covered assuming you're using a dual slot graphics card you
could alternately install your dual slot graphics card here which would leave you 1 2 3 four more slots for additional
expansion cards here's your front USB as well as your front audio and I'm going
to go ahead and assume this is fire wire although it is not labeled then other
than that that's about all we have to say about the board itself on the front
I think this looks really cool get a good closeup of that cuz it looks kind
of like you know it's attach by like a pipe or something it's just a
Southbridge heat sink I mean there's not a whole lot to it but it looks pretty
neat okay the back of the board doesn't really have anything out of the ordinary
about it so let's have a look at the io panel on the back we have 1 2 3 4 5 six
USB 2.0 connectors this is not a combo
connector so this is an eat connector this is also an ESAT connector here we
have one of those handy PS2 uh keyboard
or Mouse ports we have Optical audio out
gigabit Ethernet fire wire I know I'm going in kind of a random order today
USB 3.0 as well as 7.1 audio out so
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Sabertooth x58 tough series
motherboard from ASUS