Asus SABERTOOTH X79 Review

We had the opportunity of getting a sneak peek at Asus’s X79 line-up, back in October 2011, first hand and we came back quite impressed at what they had achieved. Along with the features of Intel’s X79 chipset, Asus has thrown in their own flavour to the mix, making it one of the most feature-rich boards in the market. Today, we’ll be taking their SABERTOOH X79 motherboard for a spin in our labs. This board hails from their TUF series, which focuses on strengthened components, better cooling, etc. It’s also designed to work under extreme temperatures without failing.  Design and Layout The SABERTOOTH is based on the LGA Socket 2011, so only the new Sandy Bridge-E CPUs are compatible. Unlike the previous TUF series boards from Asus, the X79 ditches the full “thermal armour”, which is a plastic covering over the entire motherboard to channel air flow to all the components. The reason for this was the lack of space on the motherboard to fasten a full shell properly. Instead, we have cooling for just two areas on the motherboard, the CPU VRM area and the PCH chip at the bottom. Both the heatsinks are made of aluminium with copper pipes, along with low profile fans from Delta used to blow air outwards, away from the motherboard. In order to make room for larger 3rd party heatsinks near the CPU area, the heatsinks around the CPU are connected to the ‘Thermal Armor’ via heat pipes, which exhausts all the hot air directly outside the case through vents in the I/O shield. The design is quite clever and makes the best use of the little space that’s available.

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