ASUS Sabertooth X58 Military Grade Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,308 words · ~6 min read
0:00
today we're going to be unboxing the ASUS Sabertooth x58 motherboard this is
0:04
part of their the Ultimate Force or tough series of boards so let's talk a
0:09
little bit about what makes the tough series special number one not this number one
0:14
is tough components certified by military standards so they are using the
0:20
most hardcore components possible to ensure that this board lasts for as long
0:24
as possible and they do back it up ausa's standard motherboard warranty is
0:28
3 years whereas this particular tough series board has a 5year warranty which
0:34
is pretty outstanding so let's talk a little bit about some of the other
0:37
special things about the tough series it has camix heat sink coating Tech which
0:42
in theory allows better cooling than a purely metal heat sink we also have
0:47
efficient switching power design so that means optimal power efficiency all right
0:51
many assus boards do feature technology like that for optimizing power
0:55
efficiency but this particular one is tough evidently we have sat 6 gbit per
1:00
second USB 3.0 memo K which is a feature I have talked about quite a bit in the
1:05
past so I'm not going to go too far into that as well as Aus Q design so you got
1:10
a q Shield which means that you can easily put in the motherboard from the
1:14
back and you're not going to bend pieces of metal into your slots you've also got
1:18
Q connectors which I believe we have talked about and uh actually some of
1:23
these I'm not familiar with o q dim right that's the quick installation dim
1:28
so I'll I'll show you that when we actually look at the board itself and
1:32
then maybe I can even figure out what the other ones are ah here we go yes
1:35
5year warranty notice look at that it's in many different languages too here is
1:40
the motherboard user guide including a powered by Aus sticker and a disc that
1:44
you shouldn't use you should download the latest uh utilities and drivers from
1:47
the assus website here's a certificate of reliability check that out they it's
1:52
certified reliable so test method 100 thermal
1:58
shock test look at this so these are all
2:01
military standard tests they're running on this thing on the chokes mosfets and
2:06
capacitors H that's pretty neat actually
2:09
okay then we have uh two SATA 6 GB per second cables and two
2:13
SATA 3 GB per second cables please note
2:16
these are identical cables except for the white on the 6 GB per second ones
2:20
they do not perform differently we have an SLI Bridge we have the assus Q
2:24
connector as well as the Q shield with the fuzzy foam on the back
2:29
all right let's have a look at the board itself now the look of this board is a
2:33
bit love and hate uh not everybody loves it but lots of people do because it's a
2:39
very U military themed look so you've
2:42
that means you've got military greens military camouflage style Browns you've
2:47
got a black PCB which is definitely a must for a high-end board these days and
2:52
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
2:57
you've got what appears to be an 8+2 power design around your LGA 1366 socket
3:01
you've got a fair amount of room around the socket for aftermarket coolers
3:06
and yeah I think that's pretty much all there is to say about the socket itself
3:10
you've got an eight pin power connector up here in its ideal location and I've
3:14
been asked about this a few times but this little cover is in case you do not
3:17
have an 8 Pin power connector on your power supply you can just plug in four
3:21
but if you have an eight pin use it you've got support for up to 24 gigs of
3:26
DDR3 memory in triple Channel mode so you want to populate the light brown
3:30
ones first and then the dark brown one second that is a limitation of the core
3:34
i7 memory controller this board does support up to six Core 980x Extreme
3:39
Edition processor over here on the right we have our 24 pin power connector in
3:44
its ideal location and right here we have the memo button so that means that
3:48
no matter what the memory will post so it'll find a very very safe setting
3:53
allow you to post with your memory and then tweak the settings from there let's
3:57
keep moving down the board we have SATA 6 GB per second which actually isn't
4:00
here it's here so those ones that are white colored those are your SATA 6 GB
4:05
per second and the black ones are SATA 3 gbit per second let's talk a little bit
4:10
about the Ceramics which you can see is right here so that's this kind of
4:14
sandpapery feeling coating on all of the heat sinks on this board I don't know if
4:19
it makes it cool better because I haven't like I don't have an identical
4:22
board with identical heat sinks to test against but I guess in theory it does
4:26
and ultimately it looks pretty cool so uh I mean the x58 doesn't even get that
4:31
hot anyway so it couldn't really matter one way or the other but looks great I
4:35
think check that out those are cool heat
4:38
sinks all right so let's keep going around so here's our front panel
4:42
connectors here's our clear seos button we have three PCI Express slots on this
4:47
particular board so your SLI slots are going to be these two that's why you did
4:51
have a short SLI Bridge included so when you're using both of these in 16x mode
4:55
my assumption is this one's going to run in 4X mode just like on all x58
4:59
motherboards you do have one PCI slot but as soon as you install a graphics
5:04
card that's covered assuming you're using a dual slot graphics card you
5:07
could alternately install your dual slot graphics card here which would leave you 1 2 3 four more slots for additional
5:13
expansion cards here's your front USB as well as your front audio and I'm going
5:18
to go ahead and assume this is fire wire although it is not labeled then other
5:22
than that that's about all we have to say about the board itself on the front
5:25
I think this looks really cool get a good closeup of that cuz it looks kind
5:28
of like you know it's attach by like a pipe or something it's just a
5:31
Southbridge heat sink I mean there's not a whole lot to it but it looks pretty
5:35
neat okay the back of the board doesn't really have anything out of the ordinary
5:39
about it so let's have a look at the io panel on the back we have 1 2 3 4 5 six
5:45
USB 2.0 connectors this is not a combo
5:49
connector so this is an eat connector this is also an ESAT connector here we
5:54
have one of those handy PS2 uh keyboard
5:57
or Mouse ports we have Optical audio out
6:00
gigabit Ethernet fire wire I know I'm going in kind of a random order today
6:04
USB 3.0 as well as 7.1 audio out so
6:08
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Sabertooth x58 tough series
6:12
motherboard from ASUS