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The Sabertooth supports 2 native SATA 6Gbps ports (brown) with RAID 0,1,5,10 while 4 SATA 3Gb/s ports (black) with RAID 0,1,5,10. Two Asmedia 1061 controllers provide another two SATA 6Gbps ports colored in white/grey. The eSATA 6Gbps ports located at the back panel uses one of these Asmedia 1061 controller.
Expansion slots then, the Sabertooth comes with 2 PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (single at x16, dual at x8/x8),then there's one PCIe 2.0 x16 and 3 PCIe 2.0 x1. The three graphics card slots supports NVIDIA Quad SLI and AMD Quad CrossfireX. Though with two X16 ports that's a bit of a daunting task. Then again, two dual-GPU cards would run QuadSLI. The board also supports LucidLogix Virtu MVP Technology.
So in a nutshell that is the Sabertooth Z77 preview. There's more to be found with this motherboard, ASUS now uses TUF components, which just like MSI offers, are military-standard components being used for the capacitors, MOSFETs and chokes.
New as well is DIGI+ power control, the USB Flashback feature (put the BIOS on an USB stick, power down, press the button on the back panel and it's flashing the firmware). Also a new feature is Network traffic shaping which ASUS calls Network iControl, allowing you to assign and control Ethernet bandwidth. So if you want to reserve precious bandwidth for gaming while downloading, that is now an option as you may program profiles.
We certainly like the board, it's sexy and you know it. Now all we need is an Ivy bridge processor of course. We hope you enjoyed this little preview. Once the processors are seeded we'll revisit this board with a full review, of course.
Cheers,
H.
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