 So today I'll be unboxing the Asus Sabertooth 55i and this is yet another high-end P55 motherboard from Asus so this is not part of their Republic of Gamers brand this is actually a new gaming brand from Asus the Ultimate Force or TUF get it? the ultimate? yeah okay so features on this board we've got a lot of the usual Asus high-end features but we also have some new ones first of all is Ceramics heat sink design so basically the... da da da da da da da da da da da da oh oh okay they're coating the heat sinks with ceramic which apparently gives them better heat dissipation okay cool mem fan frame you can attach a fan to your memory slots for better cooling okay efficient switching design oh TUF caps and MOSFETs okay so there's more information on this inside but that means that they're TUF okay we'll get more into that later temp probes, drive expert and mem okay their technology for making sure that even high-end memory will post okay as long as you press this button it'll set it to a safe setting so this is a Windows 7 ready board it supports LGA 1156 CPUs that means Core i7 or Core i5 CPUs so as soon as we get this box open we see the board itself which we're going to get to after the accessory package so inside the accessory package we have an I.O. shield okay there you go I.O. shield we have one IDE cable so we can assume based on that that there is an IDE port on this motherboard we have the Q connectors which are color-coded with the TUF color scheme rather than the traditional blue and white kind of nice touch there then we have what is this oh this is the fan bracket to attach a fan to your memory modules it doesn't actually include the fan itself though then we have an SLI bridge okay the crossfire bridge should be included with your video card if you need one then we have two USB and one eSATA on a little PCI backplate six SATA cables three of which are right angle and three of which are just straight connectors and then last but not least we have a user guide along with your driver CD and then even laster but not leaster you have a certificate of reliability that's kind of cute okay so your capacitors are thermal shock tested moisture resistance tested salt spray tested because that'll be useful solder ability test solder bath test vibration test mechanical shock test and the MOSFETs all have a bunch of tests too wow okay so let's get this board open now you know maybe some people like this but the first thing that comes to my mind is oh man that is the ugliest color scheme I've seen on an Asus board since they were using that cardboard colored PCB it is meant to be very military looking so this is the kind of thing you'd expect to find like strapped to the side of a tank I guess okay so let's go over the basic features of this board first of all let's do the power connectors so we have our 24 pin power along the right edge just where it's supposed to be then we've got an 8 pin power connector up at the top now while I'm here I guess I can check out these heatsinks so the heatsinks have what looks like kind of a fine fur and that's the ceramic coating on them that apparently really helps with heat dissipation so for the CPU socket we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 plus two phases for the CPU and then a couple phases for the memory as well up at the top we have an overvolt RAM button that's kind of cool to see and then we've got the memo K button here as well as an LED indicator for your RAM this heatsink down here is also ceramics up okay we got four SATA ports on the side so four right angle SATA ports and then we have four more at the top so the black ones are all controlled by the P55 chipset whereas the orange and white ones are controlled by a jmicron chipset like many high-end boards we've got onboard power and reset switches although not an onboard clear SEMO switch you have to actually set the jumper for that right here okay so we got two PCI Express 16x slots which run in 8x, 8x mode if you are using two cards and then we have three additional PCIe 1x and two PCI slots something really cool that I just noticed about this board is it has an awful lot of 4-pin fan connectors oh actually no not really okay it has two 4-pin fan connectors so two PWM fan connectors but it has a lot of other 3-pins okay so let's have a look at the I.O. on the back we got two PS2 ports, eight USB ports one optical audio out, eSATA, firewire, one gigabit ethernet I'm surprised to see only one gigabit ethernet although I mean I've never really understood why you need more than one on a consumer level board 7.1 audio and something I wanted to observe about this particular board is that I have finally found something that matches the Noctua color scheme thank you for checking out my video blog