 Today we're going to be unboxing the ASUS Sabertooth X58 motherboard. This is part of their The Ultimate Force or Tuff series of boards. So let's talk a little bit about what makes the Tuff series special. Number one, not this. Number one is Tuff components certified by military standards. So they are using the most hardcore components possible to ensure that this board lasts for as long as possible. And they do back it up. ASUS' standard motherboard warranty is three years, whereas this particular Tuff series board has a five year warranty, which is pretty outstanding. So let's talk a little bit about some of the other special things about the Tuff series. It has ceramics heatsink coating tech, which in theory allows better cooling than a pure lead metal heatsink. We also have efficient switching power design, so that means optimal power efficiency. Alright, many ASUS boards do feature technology like that for optimizing power efficiency, but this particular one is tough, evidently. We have SATA 6 gigabit per second, USB 3.0, Memo-K, which is a feature I have talked about quite a bit in the past, so I'm not going to go too far into that, as well as ASUS Q design. So you've got a Q shield, which means that you can easily put in the motherboard from the back, and you're not going to bend pieces of metal into your slots. You've also got Q connectors, which I believe we have talked about, and actually some of these I'm not familiar with. Oh, Q-DIMM, right? That's the quick installation DIMM, so I'll show you that when we actually look at the board itself. And then maybe I can even figure out what the other ones are. Ah, here we go, yes, five year warranty notice. Look at that. It's in many different languages, too. Here is the motherboard user guide, including a Powered by ASUS sticker and a disc that you shouldn't use. You should download the latest utilities and drivers from the ASUS website. Here is a certificate of reliability. Check that out. It's certified reliable. So test method, 100 and... thermal shock test. Look at this. So these are all military standard tests that are running on this thing, on the chokes, MOSFETs, and capacitors. That's pretty neat, actually. Okay, then we have two SATA 6 gigabit per second cables and two SATA... three gigabit per second cables. Please note, these are identical cables, except for the white on the six gigabit per second ones. They do not perform differently. We have an SLI bridge. We have the ASUS Q connector as well as the Q shields with the fuzzy foam on the back. Alright, let's have a look at the board itself. Now, the look of this board is a bit love and hate. Not everybody loves it, but lots of people do because it's a very military themed look. So that means you've got military greens, military camouflage style browns. You've got a black PCB, which is definitely a must for a high-end board these days. And then you've also got a lot of black components as well. So let's look at the layout over all of the board. First of all, you've got what appears to be an 8 plus 2 power design around your LGA 1366 socket. You've got a fair amount of room around the socket for aftermarket coolers. And yeah, I think that's pretty much all there is to say about the socket itself. You've got an 8-pin power connector up here in its ideal location. And I've been asked about this a few times, but this little cover is in case you do not have an 8-pin power connector on your power supply. You can just plug in four, but if you have an 8-pin, use it. You've got support for up to 24 gigs of DDR3 memory in triple channel mode. So you want to populate the light brown ones first and then the dark brown ones second. That is a limitation of the Core i7 memory controller. This board does support up to 6-core 980X Extreme Edition processor. Over here on the right, we have our 24-pin power connector in its ideal location. And right here we have the Memo K button. So that means that no matter what, the memory will post. So it'll find a very, very safe setting, allow you to post with your memory, and then tweak the settings from there. Let's keep moving down the board. We have SATA 6 gigabit per second, which actually isn't here. It's here. So those ones that are white-colored, those are your SATA 6 gigabit per second, and the black ones are SATA 3 gigabit per second. Let's talk a little bit about the ceramics, which you can see is right here. So that's this kind of sandpaper-y feeling coating on all of the heat sinks on this board. I don't know if it makes it cool better because I haven't, like, I don't have an identical board with identical heat sinks to test against, but I guess in theory it does, and ultimately it looks pretty cool. So, I mean, the X58 doesn't even get that hot anyway, so it couldn't really matter one way or the other. But it looks great, I think. Check that out. Those are cool heat sinks. All right, so let's keep going around. So here's our front panel connectors. Here's our clear CMOS button. We have three PCI Express slots on this particular board. So your SLI slots are going to be these two. That's why you did have a short SLI bridge included. So when you're using both of these in 16x mode, my assumption is this one's going to run in 4x mode, just like on all X58 motherboards. You do have one PCI slot, but as soon as you install a graphics card, that's covered, assuming you're using a dual-slot graphics card. You could alternately install your dual-slot graphics card here, which would leave you one, two, three, four more slots for additional expansion cards. Here's your front USB, as well as your front audio, and I'm going to go ahead and assume this is Firewire, although it is not labeled. Then, other than that, that's about all we have to say about the board itself on the front. I think this looks really cool. I'll get a good close-up of that, because it looks kind of like, you know, it's attached by like a pipe or something. It's just a Southbridge heat sink. I mean, there's not a whole lot to it, but it looks pretty neat. Okay, the back of the board doesn't really have anything out of the ordinary about it, so let's have a look at the I.O. panel on the back. We have one, two, three, four, five, six USB 2.0 connectors. This is not a combo connector, so this is an eSATA connector. This is also an eSATA connector. Here we have one of those handy PS2 keyboard or mouse ports. We have optical audio out, gigabit ethernet, Firewire. I know I'm going in kind of a random order today. USB 3.0 as well as 7.1 audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Sabertooth X58 Tough Series motherboard from ASUS.