Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by Coolermaster featuring the site and 240 millimeter all-in-one cpu water cooling system check it out at WWE roster USA calm my boxing an overview of one of the physically heaviest motherboards that I have ever encountered this is the saber-tooth z87 from Asus part of their top series or the ultimate force 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 of 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 5 K to 10 K niche ikonn caps and not only that but they have added check this out a metal backplate 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 armored 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 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 a 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 a soos 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 going to throw a five-year warranty at it they're pretty sure that it's actually just not going to die so let's get into these accessories because there's some really cool stuff in here that 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 saywhat therefore 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 raid our software and all that cool stuff but if you can't connect really cool things to it then ultimately you know going to care too much so you're a 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 for 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 learn more ideal than ideal location on the right-hand edge because it's right angle love right angle USB three 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 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 funderbolt header and a clear CMOS jumper your PCI Express slot layout is pretty bog-standard so you've got three PCIe 1x slots to PR three PCIe 16x slots which will run at 16 X or 8x8 X and then this one runs at 4 X 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 heat sinks 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 and 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 it is often or even people who might be using it as in say for example a more of like a workstation a value workstation environment where you want that reliability in 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 you ASP a BIOS flash back button two eSATA ports optical audio out as well as HDMI and DisplayPort ports and Intel powered Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 audio out and if any of you noticed that this board had a CPU in it 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 that don't forget to subscribe - tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos