Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of a surprisingly heavy motherboard the saber-tooth x79 has an extremely heavy box and I'm not a hundred percent sure oh man oops I wonder what that is uh I'm not a hundred percent sure why that would be but let's get into this board so it has it is a tough series board tof the ultimate 4 Series board with a five-year warranty guaranteed reliability terms and conditions may apply um PCI Express 3.0 compatibility this is an ex 79 board which means it is compatible with all of Intel's latest LGA 2011 processors and is compatible with crossfire X and SLI and when we open it up we'll find a bunch of cool stuff so you got thermal armor total airflow boosting heat dissipation so that is the cooler okay Thermal radar real-time temp detection and heat removal 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 did you pass power control so this is something that they implemented on X 79 is an all-new DIGI+ power control so that is digital power control for both the CPU and the DRAM very cool top components certified by military standard okay robust chokes capacitors and MOSFETs certified through third party military group testing Oh their SSD caching is supported so if you don't have an OC z synapse drive and if you don't have as at 68 chipset to use until SRT you can use this on these cc's x79 boards that support this feature USB 3 boat boost allows you to use devices with you asp that is a faster way of interfacing with USB 3 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 mean if Intel releases a new CPU and we have old inventory in our warehouse at NCIX 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 systems DOA and then a sue 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 that no longer matters that's so cool because it means it's reducing end-user RMA's 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 top stickers IO shield user guide including a useless DVD inside which you should download the latest off the Asus website Tough Series motherboard five-year warranty notice as well as a certificate of reliability included accessories are 4 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables to say 2 3 6 key SATA 2 3 skitty bit per second cables front Q connectors a fan which probably goes somewhere and an SLI connector that is a very short SLI bridge I have a feeling I'm not gonna like the PCI Express slots facing on this board I mean the reality of it is 99% of people still are not using dual graphics cards even let me buy high-end boards so you know I'm not gonna get my panties to much in an automatic but see that's funny how do they do that okay I guess that's okay why does this look so short to me okay nevermind it's okay that's fine that's that's that's definitely adequate spacing alright 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 BIOS it does have a UEFI BIOS which just means it's a graphical user interface you can use your mouse rather than just the keyboard to navigate it and let's start on the back because 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 backplate 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 backplate built-in it's a higher quality decision thank you Intel 96 that was Intel 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 ex 79 board is you might want to think about getting a case such as the antique 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 motherboard PCB so now let's have a look at the overall layout so you got your LGA 2011 socket a seuss much to their pride has implemented eight DIMM 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 dimm slots which is still quad-channel by the way I've had people complain about x79 boards 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 optimal channel memory it's quad channel memory for dims quad channel memory it's just on whether or not you can actually put two dimms per channel okay guys so this one support students for Channel eight dims total I don't have that many fingers for up to 64 gigs of memory using currently available stuff very neat 8 pin connector and it's 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 I'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 3 6 gigabit per second parts there's your 4 SATA 2 gigabit 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'd plug your SSD and your hard drive into and those are also say two three six gigabit per second let's go ahead and move over here there's your front panel ports there's your clear CMOS although I hope there's one on the back panel yes there no there is not yes there it no there is not fascinating okay well there's your clear CMOS huh there's another one okay ah there's your front USB to four of those it's also got your front panel audio and then your PCI Express slot leo so yeah like I said this is not what I thought it was it's okay I thought it was one two three but actually it's one two three four 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 spacing but this one is best optimized for two I also see there there TPU so what that means is that this board supports their automated overclocking which if you check out on my NCI XCOM channel they're automated overclocking utility absolutely blows away the competitors all overclocking utilities with the one button setup blows away their competitors one button overclocking utilities because it achieved a much higher overclock and it was still stable um what else we got here 16 x16 x8 X 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 2 PCIe 1x slots and let's have a look at what we got for i/o on the back here we go we've got a ps2 keyboard mouse combo part 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 firewire port isaw that's powered eSATA that's regular eSATA we've got optical audio out as well as the USB flash back port right there Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the top series x79 sabertooth board from Asus and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer video