ASUS Sabertooth P67A B3 Review
Up Close
Published: 8th April 2011 | Source: ASUS | Price: £149.99 |
Up Close
The Sabertooth packaging will be familiar to anyone who read our X58 review. It really looks very classy with the gun-metal cover and gold lettering. As much as we are used to the red ROG style from ASUS it is lovely to see something different.
The front lifts up to give further information about the Sabertooth. Normally this would reveal a clear panel with the motherboard on view, but for the Sabertooth it's just more features.
Accessories are the fiarly standard set of SATA cables, front panel header etc. One thing that does stand out is the Certificate of Reliability that comes with the manuals. Just like the X58 version this P67 Sabertooth is all about longevity of components to make it 'TUF'.
And here it is. Covered with what ASUS call Thermal Armor. This is supposed to be designed to help move air to the important parts of the motherboard to ensure everything stays cool. One thing it absolutely does is look awesome. Normal motherboards, despite colour differences, are fairly identical to look at but the Sabertooth really is striking. Covering the board obviously gives us some thermal issues to overcome, but conversely it's moving the motherboard from something with various bits of plastic and silicon soldered on, into something that really cleans up the look of your rig.
We've all spent a long time in making our computers look as amazing as possible with lights, braided cabling and everything else that is part of modifying your PC, yet the motherboard sits there as a naked and jarring un-hidable thing as possible.
No longer. Now it's either well hidden with the black or you could take it off and change the colour to suit. ASUS, should they desire, could even go a little further and anodize the three green parts in a range of popular colours to match the various mods people make. Even an average performing board can be purchased if the colour scheme matches, so imagine a great looking one in the colour you desire. It would stand astride the marketplace like a Colossus. Send 10% royalties to...
Most Recent Comments
please stop putting XXXXXXXXXXX-rated nerd porn on here - my ticker cannot take it
the whole package - awesome board
Great review as per.
an owl to owl (lol) between the NH-D14 and the new NH-C14?
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Originally Posted by zeppas
Awesome, love the sabertooth. Speaking of downward facing coolers, when will we see a head to head, a mano a mano, an owl to owl (lol) between the NH-D14 and the new NH-C14? |
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Originally Posted by hurrakan
What about SATA performance? |
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Originally Posted by Tortuga
That is awesome. A motherboard with a color scheme the D14 can actually work with? Crazy. Now we need some military-esque looking ram. |
and a Thermaltake Frio cooler. All going good so far.Couple things about the installation process I think might be worth mentioning.
1.) The Sabertooth comes with a sticker over the ram slots, which needs to be removed carefully, or else it can tear and leave parts stuck to the slots. Just be careful; I had to take quite a bit of time clearing small parts of sticker off >.>
2.) With a Thermaltake Frio installed and Vengeance in place in slots A2 and B2 (Asus recommend populating these first), there is *no* room left to use slots A1 and B1 with more Vengeance. The Frio blocks slot A1. Ram with lower heat spreaders might fit, I don't know.
It looks like one hell of a lovely board, and I think I'm going to have a fun weekend testing it
Im pretty sure the word you were looking for was bought not brought.We've always disliked companies continuing to sell you a product after you've brought it, and this sticker here can be put in that category. Ordinarily this would be a minor issue, but it's vital if manufacturers do want to put sticky things in places you need that the sticker is of the very finest quality, otherwise you have the problem we had. Gently pulling it off it decided to leave bits of it behind. A real pain to clean up. If we've brought the item we know how great it is
Nice review; seeing all these close up photos, I feel like borging together a Sabertooth-est cover out of aluminium for a future build. Teh ideas are aflowing.
How's a guy to chose what to swap out for.
dunno bout this one though with the shrowd over most of the mobo, on one hand it looks cleaner, on the other seems like the likely hood of dust getting in is actually greater and then you'd have to remove it to clean it anyway. and weather it would actually help with cooling is another thing.
seems a bit pricey too here's the price at one of my local shops. Our Price: $9999.00
That must be one hell of a board
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Originally Posted by GameOverAUS
Too many awesome looking new boards with all more or less the same stuff on em coming out. How's a guy to chose what to swap out for. dunno bout this one though with the shrowd over most of the mobo, on one hand it looks cleaner, on the other seems like the likely hood of dust getting in is actually greater and then you'd have to remove it to clean it anyway. and weather it would actually help with cooling is another thing. seems a bit pricey too here's the price at one of my local shops. Our Price: $9999.00 That must be one hell of a board |
The same place also told some guy that IDE is the same as Sata.
well yes it performs the same function but it's not the same
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Originally Posted by SirPhilby
I really really like this board and would be interested in getting this and an i5 2500k if I didn't have a sneaking suspiscion that they'd release 1154 socket in 3 month's time... |
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Originally Posted by SirPhilby
I really really like this board and would be interested in getting this and an i5 2500k if I didn't have a sneaking suspiscion that they'd release 1154 socket in 3 month's time... |
EDIT: Even though the CPU costs like £2300.
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Originally Posted by adamjamesroe
No, its all about Socket 1567; would love some company to release a consumer level mobo that supports this 8 Core 16 Threads of pure Xeon X7550 Power!!! EDIT: Even though the CPU costs like £2300. |
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