Product Showcase
Right, there we have the motherboard which can be recognized by that SaberTooth look and feel design wise, a nearly indistinguishable layout and a common feature set. That's a nice looking motherboard alright. The focus of this motherboard is that it has a dark looking ceramic 'military' design whilst remaining competitive with pricing.
We dig the two tone (black/green) design a lot, dark colored PCBs are the trend these days. What immediately catches the eye are the sheer looks and heatsinks sitting on top of the chipset. The board has lots of features which we'll walk you through in a minute.
We received the final retail sample and as such it comes packed with a quite decent product bundle. Among the gear inside the kit you'll find the following:
- 1 x Motherboard
- 1 x 2-Way SLI Bridge
- 1 x I/O Shield
- 4 x SATA 6G cables
- 1x ASUS QConnector kit
- Manual
- Driver CD
That's it, keep in mind that ASUS tried hard to keep this motherboard affordable. The extras you need to seek in the overall design and components usage, which is impressive all by itself when you peek at the motherboard for the first time.
Notable features include 8x SATA connections, USB 2.0 internal headers, 1x USB 3.0 internal header, 4x PCIe x16 slots, 1x PCIe x1 slots as well as a legacy PCI slot. The mobo has DDR3 1866 MHz support straight out of the BIOS. We spot socket AM3+, and also quality capacitors and solid core chokes.
Rear IO connectivity then -- First thing we notice, legacy PS/2 ports good stuff still preferred by hardcore gamers. We spot 1x eSATA, 1x Firewire, ASUS has managed to insert 2x USB 3.0 and 10x USB 2.0, 1 x Gigabit LAN (Realtek), optical audio out as well as 7.1 audio which is managed by the Realtek ALC892 codec which supports High Definition audio up-to 7.1 channels.
