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- Date:
- Tuesday , December 21, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
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ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard Review
The Sabertooth X58 is a new offering from ASUS’ TUF "Military" series of motherboards. I guess if you ever find yourself in a fox hole avoiding enemy fire and you’ve got a desktop PC handy with some way to power it, a PC built around the Sabertooth X58 is what you should be packing.
Introduction
ASUS ASUS is one of the largest and most well known motherboard manufacturers on the planet. Its motherboards can be found at every price point imaginable with every conceivable feature you could ever find on a motherboard today. ASUS has many product lines under its umbrella such as its Republic of Gamers brand. Among its newer series is the "TUF" series.
To be honest I’m not sure who these boards are meant for. The Republic of Gamers boards are targeted at the high end enthusiasts and gamers. ASUS have workstation series boards designed to bring maximum reliability and a feature set which businesses or professionals might need or want. In addition to that there is some enthusiast market bleed over in that enthusiasts buy them too. When I looked at the flap on the box for this board I saw "Built to Military Standard" written on it and I figured the ASUS marketing team jumped the shark. I was also hoping that meant the board was supposed to be bullet resistant or something and I’d get to break out the guns and do some ballistics testing.
Unfortunately for me that is not what they meant. In the box you’ll find a card which includes a list of what military standards the board was tested to and what those standards were. I did some checking and it would seem these standards are valid. To be honest you probably need to be an electrical engineer to fully understand or appreciate these standards. The military has standards for nearly everything so it doesn’t surprise me that they have standards for electronics devices used in the field. Why ASUS would choose to build to these standards and use the terminology for marketing purposes is beyond me unless it intends for troops in war zones to build PC’s for the purpose of gaming. So I guess if you ever find yourself in a fox hole avoiding enemy fire, and you’ve got a desktop PC handy with some way to power it, a PC built around the Sabertooth X58 is what you should be looking at.
The ASUS Sabertooth X58 is a unique offering from ASUS. ASUS honestly has what most people might say is "too many different boards that all do the same thing." And that’s a hard argument to ignore. It really does. Beyond finding it hard to figure out who this board is built for and looking at the board itself I do see a number of features which interest me. Chief among them is ASUS' CeraMX heat sinks. Ceramic is well known for its heat resistance and in the right scenarios, its durability. While ASUS doesn’t state exactly how it uses ceramic in the heat sinks design its feature list implies that it’s a ceramic coating which is used in place of anodizing or some other time of coating. The flat surface of the heat sink and irregular surface pattern create an ideal surface for heat dissipation or something to that effect. That’s what I was able to take from the marketing speak shown on the ASUS site. While the board sits at a fairly low price point for an X58 board (at the time of this writing, around $199.99), the Sabertooth X58 still manages to remain feature rich. With that said, ASUS did skimp out on features here and there. There is no Probe It feature, no onboard power or reset buttons. It does however offer SATA 6G and USB 3.0 support as well as powered eSATA.
The board features an 8+2 phase power design with 2 additional phases for memory stability. Not the most impressive sounding but when it comes to phases quality beats quantity every time. Given that the Sabertooth X58 is based on Intel’s X58 chipset it has the usual 6 SATA 3G ports and 12 USB 2.0 ports. The board also integrates two additional USB 3.0 ports, 2 SATA 6G ports, 1 gigabit Ethernet port, 2 IEEE1394a ports, 8 channel HD audio, and support for Crossfire/CrossfireX as well as NVIDIA’s SLI, 3-Way SLI, and Quad-SLI technologies.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
For an ASUS board the packaging is really fairly basic. However the price point reflects a less extravagant product. The stainless appearance of the package is probably supposed to more closely resemble gun metal but it doesn’t. In any case the board is held in place by cardboard and protected with an anti-static bag and a thin layer of foam at the bottom. Included in the box are relatively few accessories. You get a driver disc, ASUS sticker, I/O shield, SLI bridge, SATA 6G rated cables, ASUS Q-connector, user’s manual and a card showing which military standards the board was tested under.
Board Layout
The Sabertooth X58 has an excellent layout. Really I expected nothing less from ASUS though it does falter from time to time. In any case the CPU area, DIMM slots, and expansion slots are left as clear as possible to minimize installation issues with various pieces of hardware. The board feels like a quality piece of hardware. It’s heavy, damned heavy. It’s probably among the heaviest boards I’ve ever seen only being eclipsed by the Gigabyte X58-UD9. I think a lot of this weight is due to the heavy ceramic coating used on the chipset cooling solution.
As stated above, the CPU area is very clean. The heat sinks which cool the MOSFETS are low enough profile and far enough away from the CPU socket to make installation of most large coolers a breeze. Unfortunately the contact between the heat sinks and the MOSFETS themselves is pretty poor. When handling the board I found that they rocked back and forth easily only holding on due to the retention clips used at the edges of the cooling solution to hold it down.
ASUS seems to have switched almost entirely to these one sided locking tab DIMM slots. I like these and think others should really follow suit. MSI was first to lead with this feature. The slots are coded to indicate proper dual and triple channel memory operation. Right next to the memory slots is the Memory OK button which is designed to use fail safe default settings which should eliminate memory module compatibility issues.
Keeping with the board’s military-esque theme, the chipset cooling is kind of an olive drab color though it’s actually a bit bright. Black accent coloring also adorns the cooling solution as well as highlights in the form of red arrows. I think these are designed to resemble warning signs, or directional indicators found on some military vehicles. This is one of the few X58 boards I’ve seen which didn’t connect the north and south bridges together via heat pipes. Fortunately the north bridge is shaped to allow PCI x1 cards to be used in the top most PCI-Express slot without issue.
The south bridge is cooled by a flat heat sink that’s design to resemble some sort of mechanism. It’s adorned by an ASUS logo held in an octagon. It’s hard to tell if it’s coated in the CeraMX coating as well as the finish is very different than that of the north bridge or it’s accented parts. It’s far more dull. I don’t know if that means anything or not or even if that’s just our sample that’s like that. The south bridge cooling solution is flat and low enough to allow for the painless installation of larger video cards and other expansion cards.
The expansion slot area is competently designed. My only gripe here is the placement of the legacy PCI slot. It should be placed in an area where it could be utilized. If you use any card with a dual slot cooling solution this legacy slot will simply get covered up. It’s almost guaranteed to be unusable. Or at least with any card offering decent gaming performance.
The I/O panel area is chalk full of ports. It houses a legacy PS/2 port for either keyboards or mice, 6 legacy USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 RJ-45 LAN port, 2 eSATA ports, 1 of which is powered, an optical output and six-mini stereo jacks for audio. There is no clear CMOS button which upsets me a little bit. I always prefer having one of these located here.