Asus X58 Sabertooth Review

Up Close With The Sabertooth

Straight away let's cut to the chase. This is gorgeous. The layout is excellent and we haven't seen as much care taken over the design of an Asus board since the Rampage III Extreme.

The CPU socket is nicely clear of obstructions whilst the power phases still have some beefy cooling.

The RAM slots are the really nice single-latch type and it's nice to see an alternate hue used. One that, as you can see from the ATX24 pin, matches perfectly. No expense spared it seems, as we've seen plenty of otherwise pretty boards be stopped from true greatness by a default colour power connector here and there.

In keeping with the surprising nature of the X58 Sabertooth, it's still packed with the latest hardware bells and whistles. We have SATA 6Gbp/s and USB3.0.

The rear panel contains everything you could expect. Whilst you might consider the single LAN a slight let down the reality is that few people need twin LAN ports and, especially when you look at the price, if Asus have saved a little bit in unimportant areas we prefer than to money spent just to have a big spec sheet.

In keeping with the colour-coded nature of the Sabertooth, the PCI slots are also in the same caramel colour as the rest of the board. It's nice to see the USB headers colour-coded too. If anything, and we're being really picky here, it would be great to see the COM header, fan headers and SATA sockets in the same colour. They've gone the extra mile and stopped just before finish line. Admittedly Asus have still gone further than most.

The southbridge heatsink is very cool. It wouldn't look out of place in a science fiction set, or on the back of a Leopard 2A6.

Finally before we move on, another couple of shots of the colour scheme and heatsinks. The choice of colours really keep nicely with the 'Military Components' theme, and hopefully now you've seen it a few times you can all appreciate the easy-on-the-eye nature of it when compared to the heavily saturated hues we more commonly see.