The Sabertooth X58
Asus' Sabertooth X58 may share the same chipset and basic feature set as the Rampage III Gene, but this is a different beast entirely. While the Rampage pushes the envelope with the latest and greatest overclocking widgets, the Sabertooth's approach is decidedly old-school. So is its price. The Sabertooth rings in at a penny under $200, making it cheaper than the Rampage and most other X58 motherboards on the market. Remember when high-end motherboards topped out at $200? Those were the days.

Calling the Sabertooth a retro motherboard doesn't do justice to the fact that this is cutting-edge high technology. Still, I can't help but feel like the board is a bit of a throwback—in a good way. The color scheme, for example, looks like it was inspired by the palette from the original Quake.

This latest example of Asus' military industrial complex is less special ops and more Army ranger. It's a striking design, and although the choice of colors might not please everyone, I like the fact that Asus is offering a unique look. Besides, the military theme is appropriate. The Sabertooth is a part of Asus' new TUF series, which includes capacitors, chokes, and MOSFETs that meet a host of military standards for temperature tolerance, moisture resistance, and vibration. That doesn't mean the board will survive if your water-cooling setup springs a leak while the system is up and running, though.

In addition to featuring higher quality components, TUF boards also undergo "server-grade" reliability testing. I suspect that's what gives Asus the confidence to cover them with an impressive five-year warranty. The Rampage III Gene only gets three years of coverage.

The Sabertooth's unique sense of style wouldn't be complete without matching heatsinks. Appropriately angular hunks of metal flank the CPU socket on three sides, covering the north-bridge chip and the board's power regulation circuitry. Like the Rampage, the Sabertooth has a 12-phase power delivery system: eight phases for the CPU core, two for its uncore component, and an additional two phases for the north bridge.

Closer inspection of the Sabertooth's heatsinks reveals a rough finish that Asus calls CeraM!X. Apparently, the only thing more l33t than replacing letters with numbers is throwing punctuation into the mix. @wesome! On a more serious note, Asus says the porous ceramic coating increases surface area by 50%. Asus hasn't used the increase to make the heatsinks any smaller, so you'll still need to watch for clearance with larger aftermarket coolers that branch out from the socket. At least the north-bridge cooler makes room for longer expansion cards to stretch behind the top PCIe x1 slot.

A ceramic coating is no substitute for fins, but the cooling requirements of the board's ICH10R south-bridge silicon are modest at best. The chip's low-profile heatsink won't interfere with longer graphics cards, and neither will the edge-mounted Serial ATA ports. Just check to make sure that your case leaves enough room between the edge of the motherboard tray and the drive cage assembly to accommodate all your SATA cabling.

Unlike its Rampage cousin, the Sabertooth doesn't have luxuries like onboard power and reset buttons or a strip of contact points for multimeter probes. Competitive overclockers might miss those amenities, but the average user who runs his system inside a case probably won't. That same user may, however, be disappointed to learn that the only way to reset the Sabertooth's CMOS is with an onboard jumper. Remember those?

This might seem like the sort of board that should come loaded with PCI slots, but it doesn't. In fact, using a double-wide graphics card in the primary x16 slot will rob you of PCI connectivity completely. Fortunately, there are no fewer than five PCI Express slots available, three of which can accept x16 cards. The third slot only has four lanes of bandwidth running to it, and because those lanes stem from the south bridge, you're only getting gen-one speeds.

If you do the math, it becomes clear that the X58 Express doesn't have quite enough PCIe connectivity to cover the Sabertooth's various slots and peripherals. The bottom x16 slot shares PCIe lanes with the lower x1, while the USB 3.0 and 6GBps Serial ATA chips hang off auxiliary lanes in the north bridge.

Around back, the Sabertooth's port cluster serves up a little bit of everything. Seriously. Not only do you get a couple of USB 3.0 ports and FireWire connectivity, there are also dual external Serial ATA ports: one with integrated USB power and one without.

The goodness keeps flowing with analog and digital audio outs. Realtek's new ALC892 codec takes care of things behind the scenes, but like the Rampage, there are no provisions for on-the-fly Dolby Digital Live or DTS encoding. Either would allow folks with compatible speakers or receivers to skirt the onboard codec's DACs and enjoy pristine multi-channel audio in games—without having to spring for a sound card.

Gone are the days when multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports were common on high-end motherboards; we're mostly back to single ports now. That's fine by me, but Asus cut a little too deep when it decided to back the Sabertooth's one GigE jack with a PCI-based Realtek RTL8110SC networking controller. We'll see the impact of this poor peripheral choice when we test networking throughput in a moment.

The Sabertooth's BIOS serves up the same basic feature set, interface, clock tweaking options, and voltage ranges as the Rampage, although it only goes up to 2.1V for the CPU. Pfft. But seriously, that should be more than enough juice for folks cooling with air or liquids other than condensed nitrogen. As an added safeguard, Asus requires that users flip onboard jumpers to gain access to the upper voltage ranges.

Moving to fan speed controls, the BIOS gives users the same options for the CPU and system fan that we saw on the Rampage. However, there are no manual controls for the other onboard fan headers, and there's no way to enable temperature-based speed control for three-pin CPU fans. Asus' BIOS-level fan controls have come a long way over the past year, but there's still work to be done to match what was available more than seven years ago on motherboards built by Abit, an enthusiast darling at the time that's since exited the market.