 This video is brought to you by Cooler Master, featuring the Sidon 240 millimeter all-in-one CPU water cooling system. Check it out at www.coolermaster-usa.com. I'm unboxing an overview of one of the physically heaviest motherboards that I have ever encountered. This is the Sabertooth 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 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 TUF series. So they have altered the capacitors from 5K to 10K Nichicon 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 armor plastic plate on the front, and then the backplate 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 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 ASUS 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 gonna throw a five-year warranty at it, they're pretty sure that it's actually just not gonna die. So let's get into these accessories because there's some really cool stuff in here that's 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 north bridge 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 TUF series boards allows you to set up your thermal probes, say what they're for. 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 TUF series boards, we 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... 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 taking your gaming PC to a military base or something like that, yeah, get one of these. Which leads us to the board physically. So you got your thermal radar software and all that cool stuff, but if you can't connect really cool things to it, then ultimately you're not going to care too much. So your 8-pin CPU connector is up in the top left in its ideal location. And you got four, excuse me, four fan connectors up there, one of which is their new patent pending design that detects whether you're using a 3-pin or a 4-pin fan. You've got four 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-er, more ideal than ideal location on the right-hand edge because it's right angle. Love right angle USB 3 connectors. Six SATA 3 6 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 Thunderbolt header and a clear CMOS jumper. Your PCI Express slot layout is pretty bog standard, so you've got three PCIe 1x slots, two or three PCIe 16x slots, which will run at 16x or 8x, 8x, and then this one runs at 4x 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 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 heatsinks. 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 in 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 upgrade as often, or even people who might be using it as, say, for example, a value workstation environment, where you want that reliability and 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 UASP, a BIOS flashback button, two eSATA ports, optical audio out, as well as HDMI and DisplayPort ports, an 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 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 to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.