Gadgetory

everyone welcome to Paul's Hardware today I'm bringing you an unboxing of a brand new product from Asus unfortunately I also have a plane to catch to Taiwan in about like 36 hours or so and I should probably pack too so there's gonna be a quick unboxing a first look but if you guys follow my channel at all you might recognize the sabre-tooth z77 that was probably one of my favorite z77 boards that came out so today I'm going to be showing you the saber-tooth z87 so let's jump in we're starting out with a closer look at the box the saber-tooth is the 87 of course features the new z87 chipset from Intel as well as the 1150 socket for Intel's fourth generation Core processors you might more well know them as has well this is part of the tough series so you get a five-year warranty due to the military class components and Asus standing behind their work this one also supports 2-way SLI and 3-way crossfire X if you're into multi card configurations on the back of the box you get a layout of the board some detailed specs I'm just gonna give a quick look at this if you guys want to pause you can read over them all individually you also get thermal armor a tough fortifier which I'll show in just a sec the thermal radar - which gives you a bunch of temperature read points on the board as well as dust defender which is essentially a bunch of plugs and caps for all the ports on the board so that you can keep dust out of them when they're not in use inside the box you have this tough bag which is a really tough bag I suppose this is going to include your dust defender parts also a couple small fans that's for the thermal armor they're optional you can or cannot use them depending on your configuration if you want to keep them cool and don't worry they don't spend to fast and in my experience they stay pretty quiet you also get a dust defender filter of course all those caps for your USB your video outs and then also your rear panel IO also dust defender caps for your PCI Express and your DIMM slots some 1x shorter ones four PCI Express fan slot covers and also there are your PCI Express 16x covers also you get some Thermal radar temperature sensors these are on cables so you can kind of place them remotely wherever you might want to in your case you get a black Q connector very nice should blend in much better or not stand out quite as much as the white Q connectors we've seen in the past you also get a USB header an SLI bridge you get an IO shield this black in color all the i/os are labeled you get some squishy electrostatic discharge shielding on the back there as well and then you also get a software and driver disk of course best to download the latest ones of these from the Asus website you're gonna get an accessory installation guide this one's just to sort of guide you through using the dust defender parts and then you're going to get a user guide which is kind of a pretty standard user's guide with lots info about the board rounding out the accessories you get a tough inside sticker to place wherever you want a place of sticker certificate of reliability that's for the military class caps chokes and MOSFETs on the board and of course SATA cables you get four of them and I like that they've actually given you a couple with straight plugs on both ends and a couple with straight plugs and then to a ninety degree angled plugs and onto the motherboard itself you will notice the tough themes showing right through if you've ever looked at one of the Asus tough series motherboards in the past they typically feature military colors in this case you got black silver some brown and some tan on the slots also a few green highlights as well you will notice the black plastic Thermal Armor that's a cover it's going to protect the components on the board it's also going to allow you to channel airflow more directly specifically over a lot of the power delivery components on the board or on that in just a moment you're also going to get the tough fortifier it's a metal backplate so you've probably seen back plates on video cards and now you got one on a motherboard it's got the very clever we got your back text right on there this is gonna provide some extra rigidity for the board some more sturdiness it also gives a nice little feature that just lets you set the board down on a flat surface without having to worry about actually dinging the surface you're setting it on or damaging any of the components on the board which I I found to be very handy yeah it looks pretty cool too you'll notice a little bit of texture on the tough fortifier and it's also spaced out a little bit from the PCB and that's gonna allow some hair to flow back there because the back of the motherboard does get warm too you will notice Thermal Armor vents this is a back on the front with the plastic thermal armor those are called flow valves by ASUS you can flip them open or close and again that's going to let you channel the air or block it depending on your configuration and whether or not you have the little fans installed next up the PCI Express 3.0 area you'll notice all of these slots you get three x1 slots and then you get three full-sized phisically 16x slots and Haswell processors at least most of the high-end ones are going to have 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes if you have a single card installed it'll run at 16 X on that top slot you can also do an 8 X + 8 X configuration that'll be for a two-way SLI or crossfire X and then you do have 3-way crossfire X support and that all the full length slots will run it 8 4 & 4 if you actually populate all three of them for SATA over on the side you have a bunch of SATA revision 3 6 gigabits per second ports available from the z87 chipset that's native those are the brown ports that you see right there and those being native means they're gonna be very fast you also get raid support raid 0 1 5 & 10 so if you need to plug in a bunch of SSDs you're gonna be all set these also support Intel's Smart Response and rapid start technology he also noticed a couple tan ports right there those are actually from an add-on as media chip also say to Rev 3 6 gigabits per second and speaking of add-on as media chips there's also a couple eSATA 3 ports available on the back also from as media add-on ship you also probably spot a green at right angle port right there that's USB 3.0 and that's another great feature is the 87 you get native a USB 3.0 six of those available two of them will be available from that right angle header along the bottom edge you'll notice some additional headers a USB 2.0 got some front panels you got chassis fan headers two four pin ones down there speaking of chassis fan headers you also get three more fan headers at the top edge that are also four pin a couple for a CPU and then one more for chassis you also have the direct key but life to immediately access the UEFI also an audio front panel header and then we will move on to the ddr3 dimms slots this is dual channel of course just like you might have noticed for Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge dual channel so they color coded by your sticks in sets of two supports up to 32 gigs of memory of course also supports Intel's XMP or extreme memory profiles and officials 1866 speed support from Intel you can also go for overclock speeds beyond that if you so desire to the left of the DIMM slots we have the 1150 socket that's going to be for your fourth generation has well processor not backwards compatible don't drop an Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge processor in there now you get military class power delivery components you'll see them peeking out there underneath the thermal armor they look quite nice I got some logos on them you can see some of the chokes and caps right there laid out a very very tantalizingly that's for your power delivery and finally we will close with the rear i/o so here you have the rest or the forum or if a USB 3.0 also natively supported by z87 chipset these all I should mention including that front panel hider support isus USB 3.0 boost which gives you markedly improved USB 3.0 transfer speeds also for USB 2.0 ports you'll see a little gap there and that's for the thermal armor fan if you do install that it'll give some ventilation for that I get an hdmi and displayport for the IGP you and your Haswell processor you got an Intel NIC you get an optical Toslink and audio ins and outs and that's for your integrated ru and that is gonna wrap it up for this quick unboxing and overview video guys and what I'd like to hear from you is what kind of more in-depth coverage you'd like to see of this board or of other boards from the Asus is the 87 line because I have access to a couple of them right now and I'd love to sort of dig into the BIOS perhaps maybe some of the extra features that Asus is added on whether you're talking software hardware based so please leave me a comment in the comment section below let me know what you'd like me to do with this board apart from plugging it in and using it of course and I'll be sure to follow up and try to bring you guys as much of that coverage as I possibly can but then I'm going away to Taiwan for a couple weeks I'll be reporting from Computex so you can find that coverage on our new ik TV YouTube channel actually by the time this video goes up chances are I will already have been there and will already be posting so check out our YouTube channel I'm sure on there doing crazy stuff in Taiwan but that's all for this one I guess subscribe if you liked the video like the video if you thought it was useful and I'll see you all in Taiwan