 Welcome to my unboxing of a surprisingly heavy motherboard. The Sabertooth X79 has an extremely heavy box and I'm not 100% sure. Oh man, oops, I wonder what that is. I'm not 100% sure why that would be, but let's get into this board. So it is a TUF series board, TUF, the ultimate force series board with a 5 year warranty, guaranteed reliability, terms and conditions may apply, PCI express 3.0 compatibility. This is an X79 board which means it is compatible with all of Intel's latest LGA 2011 processors. It is compatible with Crossfire X and SLI. And when we open it up we'll find a bunch of cool stuff. So we've 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 DigiPlus power control, so this is something that they implemented on X79, is an all new DigiPlus power control, so that is digital power control for both the CPU and the DRAM, very cool. Tough component certified by military standard, okay. Robust chokes capacitors, MOSFET certified through third party military grade testing. Oh, their SSD caching is supported, so if you don't have an OCZ Synapse drive and if you don't have a Z68 chipset to use Intel SRT, you can use this on Asus X79 boards that support this feature. USB 3.0 boost allows you to use devices with UASP, that is a faster way of interfacing with USB 3.0 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 means 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 system's DOA, and then Asus 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 it no longer matters. That's so cool because it means it's reducing end user RMAs, 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 TUF stickers. I.O. Shield. User guide, including a useless DVD inside, which you should download the latest off the Asus website. TUF series motherboard, five-year warranty notice, as well as a certificate of reliability. Included accessories are four SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second cables, two SATA 3, 6 gigabit 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 going to like the PCI Express slot spacing on this board. I mean, the reality of it is 99% of people still are not using dual graphics cards, even when they buy high-end boards. So I'm not going to get my panties too much in a knot about it, but you know how it is. See, that's funny. Why did they do that? Oh, okay. I guess that's okay. Why does this look so short to me? Okay, never mind. It's okay. That's fine. That's definitely adequate spacing. All right. 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 of 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. Not Asus. Right, right, right. On that note, okay. Oh, you know what? It's too far away. But something to consider if you're buying an X79 board is you might want to think about getting a case such as the Antec 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've got your LGA 2011 socket. Asus, 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? It's not dual channel memory. It's quad channel memory, four DIMMs, quad channel memory. It's just on whether or not you can actually put two DIMMs per channel. OK, guys? So this one supports two DIMMs per channel, eight DIMMs total. I don't have that many fingers for up to 64 gigs of memory using currently available stuff. Very neat. Eight pin connector in its 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. We'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 ports. There's your 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports, as well as running off a third party Marvell 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 SATA 3 6 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, no, there is not. Fascinating. Okay. Well, there's your clear CMOS. Huh, there isn't another one. Okay. There's your front USB 2 for those. We've also got your front panel audio and then your PCI Express slot layout. So yeah, like I said, this is not what I thought it was. It's okay. I thought it was 1, 2, 3, but actually it's 1, 2, 3, 4. 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 2. I also see their TPU. So what that means is that this board supports their automated overclocking, which if you check out on my NCIXCOM channel, their automated overclocking utility absolutely blows away the competitors' 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. What else we got here? 16x, 16x, 8x 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. Two PCI-E 1x slots and let's have a look at what we got for I.O. on the back. Here we go. We got a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. 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. That's powered eSATA. That's regular eSATA. We've got optical audio out as well as the USB flashback port right there. Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the TUF Series X79 Sabertooth board from Asus and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.