ASUS engineers are going a little potty with the latest X58 motherboard design: quite literally!
The 'Sabertooth' branding is a recent shift by ASUS that aims to provide a mix of both high- and low-end features at a price somewhere between both those categories, satisfying those interested in an X58 platform but who don't want to cough up cash for the higher-end Rampage series.
The Sabertooth X58 is a pretty standard design that offers three physical PCIe x16 slots, though the third is crippled to only four lanes. This is because the slots are all powered by the X58 chipset; there are no fancy Lucid Hydras or NVIDIA NF200 chips to be seen here.
Now-standard features such as USB 3.0 and SATA3 make an appearance with two of each port, which ASUS are qualifying with the word "True". This is slightly misleading, as neither implementation is truly integrated to either the X58 Northbridge nor ICH10R Southbridge, instead being powered by two add-in chips.
Also making a showing in the Sabertooth X58 is what ASUS marketing are calling "The Ultimate Force", or "TUF", or perhaps more maddeningly, "/tΛf/". Tee tent eff. In reality this signifies that the heatsinks and components used in the design are ruggedised, and that the motherboard design has been verified by a third-party military-quality series of tests.
It also means the heatsinks are coated in a ceramic mix, similar to ceramic pots, which theoretically gives a larger surface area to dissipate heat from compared to a flat metal surface. Whether this results in a cooler motherboard remains to be seen in our full testing and review in the magazine, but you're more than welcome to see and read more about the Sabertooth in our gallery of photos:
Issue: 137 | June, 2012