ASUS TUF Sabertooth Z77 Motherboard Formally Launched

ASUS has unveiled one of its highest-end motherboards, part of the established TUF series and outfitted with the Thermal Armor cooling technology that seldom gets called upon.

Thermal Armor is a military-grade cooling solution that uses a convection hole design and optimizes VRM cooling, as well as pretty much everything else.

Thus, on the Sabertooth Z77, only the CPU socket is left bare, since CPUs have their own coolers and it makes sense that there would be as much space as possible, knowing how huge some air coolers are.

In addition to the heat dissipating traits, the Thermal Armor is backed by a Thermal Radar, whose Fan Overtime feature keeps a pair of turbo fans running for a while after system shutdown.

Moving on, the TUF engine power design pairs the thermal Armor with 8 +4 +2 Digital Phase Power, military-grade Choke, Cap. & MOSFET, DIGI+ Power Control Utility, etc.

Not only that, but the self-explanatory Dust Defender is present as well.

Needless to say, ASUS wasn't about to strap this effective and expensive cooling setup on just any motherboard.

In other words, the Intel Ivy Bridge-ready Sabertooth Z77 motherboard has top of the line performance specs too.

For starters, four memory slots permit a top capacity of 32 GB DDR3 RAM (dual-channel, 1866/1600/1333 MHz Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory).

Secondly, there are four SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and six SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors, plus RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 support.

Furthermore, ASUS tossed in a pair of PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, for single and dual-card graphics setups, although the dual mode will have the slots working in x8 mode.

One PCI Express 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black) is available too, plus three PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots, Gigabit Ethernet and, of course, video ports (HDMI and DisplayPort).

Finally, the I/O list includes a bunch of USB 3.0 connectors (four ports at the back, two via headers) and 10 USB 2.0 (four at the rear panel, six through headers).

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