Product Showcase

The motherboard has an 8 Phase CPU Digital Power Design. As you can see ASUS applied new Alloy Chokes, these would be called 'TUF Alloy chokes'. According to asus they offer +20% temp. tolerance and 5X longer lifetime usage.

Look at the shielding, we can see the thermal armor a little better, it has a flow gate mechanism which allows you to open, or close the thermal armor via a button. When the gate is open, it provides a better thermal solution for the CPU. When the gate is closed it focuses air on heatpipes for better heat removal. The thermal armor covering most parts of the board, included are dust-covers or dummy-spacers for most ports, slots, and headers. 

SATA ports -- ASUS is equipping the board with a good six SATA3 ports and one SATA Express slot. MSI makes use of two controllers though. The SaberTooth also features two small fans for active cooling with the thermal-armor, though you need to install these manually. We prefer an all silent solution though an extra active fan can cool down the board a notch better of course.

Intel Z97 chipset : 
1 x SATA Express port, black, compatible with 2 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports
4 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s)

ASMedia PCIe SATA controller :
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), beige
 

You will get four DIMM slots which offer support for dual-channel DDR3 memory up to DDR3 1866/1600/1333 MHz Non-ECC. You can install a maximum of 32 GB in total. XMP is supported, we'll show you this petit setup running at 2133 MHz.