Layout

The Sabertooth X79 comes in the typcial military look, which ASUS provides their TUF series motherboards with. Therefore the manufacturer uses colors like olive-green, black and grey. Generally it is the goal to achieve a look that automatically suggests that this is a high quality and "tough" product. Like the predecessors this model also comes with cooling blocks made from ceramic. Altogether ASUS succeeded in generating a homogenous look but one really needs to like the color scheme and we think that not everybody will enjoy the military looks.

ASUS provided their latest TUF-series motherboard with a digital power design, whereas the CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets two phases. Looking at the capacitors themselves you'll find ML caps around the CPU socket. These multilayer polymer capacitors offer advantages over ceramic capacitors. Therefore super ML caps remain stable under regular as well as AC voltage, doesn't have an aging mechanism and are resilient under thermal shock.

Totally you'll find eight DIMM-slots on the ASUS Sabertooth X79. Officially supported are DDR3 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz with up to 64 Gigabyte capacity. There is enough space to install a big aircoolers and they shouldn't interfere with memory.

 

The current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. There are two separate cooling blocks covering the area which are connected via a heatpipe. The southbridge got a cooling block too, which has not been integrated into the heatpipe loop of the VRM but therefore comes with a small fan. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.