**In-Depth Review of the Motherboard**

The motherboard I have been testing recently is one that really caught my attention due to its features and quality construction. As soon as I opened up the box, I was impressed with the build quality of this board. The metal casing is sturdy and feels premium in your hands.

One of the first things I noticed about this motherboard was the placement of the headers for fan control. Typically, you would find these headers soldered directly onto the motherboard, but on this particular board, there are three additional headers that you can plug in to give you more fine-grained control over the fans around the system. This means you can set up really aggressive fan profiles, which is perfect for overclocking enthusiasts.

Another feature I noticed was the ability of the fans to run for a while after the system turns off, helping to dissipate heat from the system once it's powered down. This is a great touch that will make users happy, especially those who tend to forget to turn off their systems when they're not in use.

One of the things I was excited about trying out on this motherboard was the fan control software suite. The AI Charger and Thermal Radar 2 software were both updated versions from previous models, and I was eager to see how they had improved. I'm happy to report that they have indeed gotten better - no crashes, no weird behavior, just solid, reliable performance.

However, there is one piece of software that still gave me some trouble: the "diagnostic" tool. This tool is supposed to let you do technician-level diagnostics on your system from a phone, but I had some issues getting it to work properly. Thankfully, it was not too bad, and with some patience, I was able to get it up and running.

One thing that did cause me some concern was the thermal management of the m.2 slot. If you have one of those hot-running Samsung drives inside the slot, you'll want to be careful. I had a friend who told me that they use a heat sink on their builds for these drives, just in case they get too hot.

In terms of Linux support and drivers, this motherboard has been rock-solid. It's clear that the manufacturer put a lot of effort into making sure that every aspect of this board was thoroughly tested before it shipped out.

Overall, I'm really happy with this motherboard. The build quality is top-notch, the features are exactly what you'd expect from a high-end enthusiast board, and the software suite is reliable and easy to use. If you're in the market for a new motherboard, I highly recommend checking one of these out.

**Additional Notes**

The author also mentions that he tested the thermal R2 software, which was more stable and easier to install than previous versions. This suggests that the manufacturer has put a lot of work into improving the user experience with their software suite.

It's worth noting that the motherboard comes with AI Charger and Thermal Radar 2 software, which can be used to monitor and control various aspects of the system, including fan speeds and temperatures. The author also mentions that they had trouble getting the diagnostic tool to work properly, but this was not a major issue for them.

The author's experience with the motherboard has been generally positive, with one notable exception: the diagnostic tool did cause some trouble for them. However, even with this minor hiccup, they were able to get it working eventually.

Overall, this motherboard seems like a solid choice for anyone looking for a high-end enthusiast board with plenty of features and a reliable user experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe ASUS Sabertooth x99 taking a bite out of the premium x99 motherboard Market this is the next iteration of the venerable Sabertooth line from Asus this is of course the x99 version designed to support socket 2011-3 CPUs such as the Intel 5960x it's got quad Channel memory support supporting up to 64 GB of ddr4 that's with a clock speed of up to 3,300 MHz for those of you not familiar this line of motherboard uh uses a lot of components branded tough that is to say that it uses you know chokes coils Etc that are designed for you know millspec they say but it's designed for durability and longevity my opinion of this line is that they're going for workstation grade reliability but with Enthusiast features for overclocking and durability and longevity once again there is so much stuff with this motherboard I could probably drone on for an hour about it the the thing that separates this motherboard from other motherboards is that it's not just a motherboard it's all the other stuff that's bundled with it it's all the sort of thought and Care put into other componentry other than the motherboard itself so we're talking about the software bundle we're talking about things like the dust filter we're talking about the fan management controller all this stuff that we'll get into but it's a lot above and beyond just x99 sakeet 2011-3 motherboard with a couple of PCI Express slots the first thing is that these boards come with a card certifying that the board has been tested before it left the Factory and there's a little list of tests that have been performed so if you don't like getting DOA Hardware this will minimize your chances of getting a DOA mother motherboard in fact if you actually get a Sabertooth motherboard DOA I want to hear from you in the forums because that would be really surprising I want to sort of know the circumstances of of how that happened but Factory testing basically helps minimize DOA and the types of tests that are done are shown on this card here which is neat the color palette of this board certainly feels military uh the plastic front cover and metal back plates serve important functional uh purposes as well the front thermal armor provides a duct through which air can flow and Asus provides a small fan that can be mounted above the vrms at the back of the board for increased directed air flow uh this is especially helpful for all-in-one water coolers that may not be producing much air flow around the CPU socket the way that a traditional Tower cooler or you know just a normal forced air cooler would do uh this mini fan also supports an option where it'll spin backwards to help dislodge dust and and help you if you're trying to blow the system out and dust it uh the back of the motherboard is fastened to this heavy metal plate Asus calls that the tough fortifier this is thermally connected to the motherboard and can act as a heat sink the material provided with the motherboard says that this armor can lower the temperature of the motherboard Itself by up to 6° which will help increase longevity and reliability also included in the Box are dust plugs for pretty much everything there are dust plugs for the internal connectors the expansion slots the io ports you name it the idea is that you put these dust plugs on your unused connectors and the unused connectors are never going to collect dust when you need to use them you just pull the little rubber stoppers out and then you can use them and there's no dust also in the Box are three external temperature sensors Asus has gone all out in the thermal monitoring fan situation with this motherboard their marketing materials called this the tough ice but what that actually is uh is a hardware IC or Hardware fan controller that provides five extra individually controllable DC or pwm fan headers and there are total of 12 thermal sensors now 12 thermal sensors is a lot nine of those are soldered on the motherboard and then there are three extras that are at the end of these wires that you can place wherever you could place them on hard drive you could place them like physically place it on your GPU you know maybe the back plate on your GPU you know whatever and you can monitor the thermal situation with those 12 sensors the board also provides on board five DC pwm controllable fans you can use DC or pwm to control the fan speed whichever one you want to do um so that gives you a total of nine independently controllable DC pwm fans plus a tenth fan which is your CPU fan but you know everybody's got the CPU fan so that doesn't really count does it so at the back of the board starting from the left you got four usb2 ports that other USB port that's turned sideways is actually an interface for a piece of software called tough detective what this does is this USB port communicates with your phone or Android tablet something running Android you run an app called tough detective and tough detective interfaces with the microcontroller or the firm management controller on the motherboard and so from that you can power off the system power it on we'll get to that in a minute there's two USB 3.1 10 GB per second ports those are the lighter colored usb3 ports four more usb3 ports two gigb L interfaces one Intel one realtech then the audio connections provided by the realtech alc 1150 codec that's a spdif optical plus analog in andout you've also got the option of USB bios flashback there's the button uh which will let you flash your bios even without a CPU you've got to have that if you know a new CPU comes out and you buy this motherboard and you get the newer CPU uh you know normally you have to boot up your motherboard in order to flash the BIOS and if you've gotten a new CPU that the motherboard doesn't support without the software update you're kind of stuck historically in the olden days you'd have to borrow somebody's old CPU boot up your motherboard Flash and then give them their old CPU back which is just a pain USB bios flashback sort of avoids that you can put your BIOS on a USB stick even without a processor installed in the motherboard it can Flash the bios so it's pretty neat the m.2 slot is hidden away in the thermal armor itself enclosed here at the bottom of the board I worry about this because m.2 drives like the new Samsung m.2 produce an insane amount of heat and and I've seen some builds that require glue on heat sinks on the Samsung to keep it cool just because there was no air flow around the m.2 slot because of the m.2 slot placement on the motherboard if you use the m.2 are you meant to replace the cover so that it's a completely enclosed situation I would probably recommend that you run without the cover if you're using m.2 also this is a pcie m.2 that means that there's no SATA connectivity in this m.2 slot but this m.2 does support the nvme breakout card which is a little card that you put in the m.2 slot that gives you a minias connector and that minias connector will carry the pcie by3 signaling to an external nvme SSD now the situation is that Intel has got these crazy high-speed nvme ssds but they're big and they're bulky and they just won't physically fit in the m.2 slot I mean really to get high capacities to fit in an m.2 slot we're going to need like 3D die stacking technology and that sort of thing to really get the memory densities up to be able to stick this in there but it's a it's a miniature pcie by4 connection so if you don't want to use a pcie SSD because you got graphics cards in the way you can use the nvme adapter in the m.2 slot to an external nvme SSD now this has been in the server space for a while uh it's technically a minias connector which is not exactly the ideal connector to carry BCI Express signaling it's not minias it's just the Minas connector and you can use that connector to carry the PCI Express Lanes to a a quasi looking you know 2 and 1/2 in SSD the Intel ones right now are about 50% heat SN so that should tell you something but I digress let's build a system so we can take a look at the UEFI and the software in terms of Hardware features first off you have three pcie by 16 physical if you're going to run a three-way Graphics config you need a case that has an extra slot below the edge of the motherboard in order to be able to support that because the last by6 Lane is the very last spot for an expansion slot on the motherboard this has to be done this way to support graphics cards that take up to three expansion slots for 2011-3 processors that support 40 PCI Express Lanes this means that you can run by 16x 16x 8 and this would be the required configuration for a three-way Nvidia setup for 28 Lane processors such as the 5820k you can run by 16x 8x4 with an AMD Graphics solution or by 16x by8 with an Nvidia or an AMD Graphics solution the first two by6 PCI E slots are gen 3 while the black one on the bottom says it's pcie Gen 2 um if you have non-graphic peripherals you can get up to by eight on all five PCI Express slots here with a 40 Lane CPU now something that I found really neat with this motherboard is a piece of software called tough detective this is actually a mobile app that you get on your cell phone and you plug in that special USB port at the back so if we go ahead and plug it in here I'm going to plug this into the Asus Zen phone 2o because surely that won't lead to problems foreshadowing and we're going to just deploy the software and run it and see what it does and this was really fiddly I had a lot of trouble with this I don't know why it actually would hard loock the Zen phone 2 fairly consistently I even went so far as to update the UEFI and it was still a little fiddly but when I did get it to work it was actually really awesome I could get the postcode the last boot status I could clear seamoss I could force a system shutdown I could do a graceful system shutdown I could read the information from the system about the memory that was installed the current fan speeds temperature voltages pretty much any information that's useful from a diagnostic standpoint you could sit there and read it and actually get it on your phone even with the system powered off you could power it on and that's that's actually exactly what we did so I think that this application it has some bugs but I think that once the bugs get worked out this is going to be really really useful so if at first you don't succeed with this application try and try again once I did get it working it was pretty stable I just don't know why I had trouble initially it was sort of weird and crashy it did lock up my phone a couple of times but then once I got it working it was actually it was actually all right it would be nice to see more controls like maybe one one button overclock or like one button toggle between you know like normal and super overclock but that'll probably come later on down the line I hope that this functionality is a Herald of things to come on future motherboards because being able to use your smartphone to do diagnostics actually is a pretty cool thing this one's uh easy tuning wizard was a little different when you click easy tuning wizard it asks you some options about your cooling situation and whether you want to optimize for power usage or performance and I just sort of clicked and let it do its thing and the end result was that my 5960x that was in there was running at about 3.9 GHz on turbo and about 3 gz all the rest of the time found the overclock to be pretty stable but I was able to push it to about 4.5 normally manually so that's that's a pretty good overclock in a 5960x it's not the greatest but it's not really that bad either and that was around I think 1.7 volts if memory serves I didn't really run Prime 95 or anything like that to see how stable it was long term because that's sort of that's sort of what I'm used to with that chip that's sort of what I pushed it to but the system was very stable even with the overclock just running through benchmarks and running through our standard Fair stuff I'd actually forgotten that I'd overclocked it I was like wow this is actually really fast I was like oh still overclocked well that would explain it I'm not sure if this is a new feature in the UEFI or not but it does have this raid configuration option so that if you've got a bunch of discs you can just hit a button and it'll configure the the uh on chipet raid that's a software raid so I tend to shy away from software raid myself but the feature is there if you use it just going through the UEFI I'm always very impressed with asus's UEFI it seems like their UEFI in terms of number of options of fine grain controls I mean the fan controls you've got these 10 pwm DC fan controls and you can control it all you've got the stuff that you can control from thermal radar too in terms of the stuff that they put in their UEFI it's crazy the amount of stuff in UEFI I mean it's a 2011 3 motherboard and so you know it's pretty modern but in terms of all of the features that they give you in the UEFI it's really you know Far and Away tons of options there it's it's always really impressive to look at it because they they have every little thing in the UEFI that you can play with and I really like it there's also really good for Linux so you can set your fan profiles and things in the UEFI and your temperature profiles and then you don't have to mess with it in Linux which is really great and so it would not be Tech Syndicate if Linux wasn't horning in on the action some way I decided to boot up Ubuntu 15.0 4 cuz I had the install stick from where I did the Ubuntu 15.04 on the Surface Pro 3 video just because carel 3.19 is fairly recent so booted it up everything worked audio worked both network cards worked the onboard peripherals worked USB 3 uh both the as media uh USB 3.1 and the uh USB 3 just regular USB 3.0 both sets of ports worked it was fine I used a memory stick to test now I'm not sure if I'm getting the USB 3.1 speeds on the as media controller I suspect that that will be fiddly cuz that's a new thing maybe it's okay I don't know I didn't test that part of it but for using a normal USB memory stick worked fine so I think I can report Linux actually works pretty well on this motherboard and I was doing a UEFI boot so I didn't have any problem booting back and forth between Windows installation on an SSD and the Linux installation on an m.2 so take that for what you will now of course if you're looking for even more control the bundled software that comes with the Sabertooth also includes uh the thermal radar 2 this is where you can get a read out of your nine different thermal sensors that are soldered on the motherboard and and the three that you can add in if you like to plug those in see what's going on this also gives you much finer granularity control of those 10 DC pwm fan headers all around the motherboard and so with this you can actually set really aggressive fan profiles another feature that I'm not I think is a new feature on this motherboard is that the fans can actually run for a while after the system turns off to help you know sort of get the heat out of the system after you turn it off so it's not just sitting there baking think think that's kind of a nice touch you can actually set your own profiles like your own behavior profiles so depending on the thermal readings from all the different sensors around the system you can control the fans individually for a tower system where you've got you know up to 10 fans being able to individually control all of the fans will help you minimize noise but still have uh you know really aggressive overclocking really aggressive you know video card cooling uh depending on what you're doing while also being able to minimize your noise because you can control each fan individ ually so you can really sit there and dial it in in terms of whatever Behavior you want as far as uh you know having the right fan kick on to cool the right component I think that's a nice touch in terms of like motherboards that have fan controllers I really haven't seen anything that has a fan control temperature control situation as sophisticated as what I see in this motherboard so given the build quality sort of the crossover between workstation and Enthusiast this is sort of a nice touch I'm also happy to report that installing thermal R2 and the entire Suite of software that that it comes with AI charger and all that is a lot easier than it has been in years past you know in years past it's really the software has been a little bit fiddly uh and a little bit crashy and so I tried to poke at it a little bit to see how things had improved and I'm happy to report that things seem to have improved as far as the software being stable and not crashy and not weird and it's always the edge cases where it would act a little bit weird or like AI charger wouldn't exactly work exactly right it seems like those problem problems have been resolved uh from just sort of testing things that had been issues on on previous motherboards so it's really nice to see that a lot of quality control and a lot of testing apparently went into this version of AI suite and thermal radar 2 software it's the sort of the whole suet of software that goes with that so that's really nice I think honestly the thing that I had the most trouble with was the uh tough detective and I think that you know some leway can be given there because that's a new piece of software sort of new functionality what else is out there that lets you control the entire motherboard and basically do you know technician level Diagnostics you know from your cell phone on a motherboard that's pretty neat I had a lot of fun with that so overall I didn't really run into anything bad with this motherboard the most disconcerting thing is that if you've got an m.2 that produces a lot of heat I don't think you're going to want to put the door on the m.2 slot I don't have one of the Samsung drives handy but we did a build with one about 6 months ago and it was really hot when we were doing the disc Diagnostics and so I would not feel com able putting one of those inside the m.2 carrier I'll have to remember to ask if they've tested that scenario and sort of what the outcome was have some friends that uh are system integrators and uh they reported that they they actually have a stick on heat sinks for some of the builds that they do with the Samsung the uh super hotr running m.2 Samsung drives and so if they're sticking heat sinks on those I just I don't know if i' if you're going to get a hot running m.2 don't put a hot running m.2 inside the armor I just don't think that's a good idea and you can monitor the temperature with your finger basically put your finger on the chips and if it's you know so hot that you have to bring your finger away that that may be a problem so make short in the lifetime of your m.2 other than that this motherboard is really solid in terms of software in terms of Linux support in terms of drivers it's actually really stable it's really good I liked it so if you've got one of these or you are thinking about getting one of these I want to see you in the forums over at Tex ind.com so I'll see you there I'm signing out for this window ohthe ASUS Sabertooth x99 taking a bite out of the premium x99 motherboard Market this is the next iteration of the venerable Sabertooth line from Asus this is of course the x99 version designed to support socket 2011-3 CPUs such as the Intel 5960x it's got quad Channel memory support supporting up to 64 GB of ddr4 that's with a clock speed of up to 3,300 MHz for those of you not familiar this line of motherboard uh uses a lot of components branded tough that is to say that it uses you know chokes coils Etc that are designed for you know millspec they say but it's designed for durability and longevity my opinion of this line is that they're going for workstation grade reliability but with Enthusiast features for overclocking and durability and longevity once again there is so much stuff with this motherboard I could probably drone on for an hour about it the the thing that separates this motherboard from other motherboards is that it's not just a motherboard it's all the other stuff that's bundled with it it's all the sort of thought and Care put into other componentry other than the motherboard itself so we're talking about the software bundle we're talking about things like the dust filter we're talking about the fan management controller all this stuff that we'll get into but it's a lot above and beyond just x99 sakeet 2011-3 motherboard with a couple of PCI Express slots the first thing is that these boards come with a card certifying that the board has been tested before it left the Factory and there's a little list of tests that have been performed so if you don't like getting DOA Hardware this will minimize your chances of getting a DOA mother motherboard in fact if you actually get a Sabertooth motherboard DOA I want to hear from you in the forums because that would be really surprising I want to sort of know the circumstances of of how that happened but Factory testing basically helps minimize DOA and the types of tests that are done are shown on this card here which is neat the color palette of this board certainly feels military uh the plastic front cover and metal back plates serve important functional uh purposes as well the front thermal armor provides a duct through which air can flow and Asus provides a small fan that can be mounted above the vrms at the back of the board for increased directed air flow uh this is especially helpful for all-in-one water coolers that may not be producing much air flow around the CPU socket the way that a traditional Tower cooler or you know just a normal forced air cooler would do uh this mini fan also supports an option where it'll spin backwards to help dislodge dust and and help you if you're trying to blow the system out and dust it uh the back of the motherboard is fastened to this heavy metal plate Asus calls that the tough fortifier this is thermally connected to the motherboard and can act as a heat sink the material provided with the motherboard says that this armor can lower the temperature of the motherboard Itself by up to 6° which will help increase longevity and reliability also included in the Box are dust plugs for pretty much everything there are dust plugs for the internal connectors the expansion slots the io ports you name it the idea is that you put these dust plugs on your unused connectors and the unused connectors are never going to collect dust when you need to use them you just pull the little rubber stoppers out and then you can use them and there's no dust also in the Box are three external temperature sensors Asus has gone all out in the thermal monitoring fan situation with this motherboard their marketing materials called this the tough ice but what that actually is uh is a hardware IC or Hardware fan controller that provides five extra individually controllable DC or pwm fan headers and there are total of 12 thermal sensors now 12 thermal sensors is a lot nine of those are soldered on the motherboard and then there are three extras that are at the end of these wires that you can place wherever you could place them on hard drive you could place them like physically place it on your GPU you know maybe the back plate on your GPU you know whatever and you can monitor the thermal situation with those 12 sensors the board also provides on board five DC pwm controllable fans you can use DC or pwm to control the fan speed whichever one you want to do um so that gives you a total of nine independently controllable DC pwm fans plus a tenth fan which is your CPU fan but you know everybody's got the CPU fan so that doesn't really count does it so at the back of the board starting from the left you got four usb2 ports that other USB port that's turned sideways is actually an interface for a piece of software called tough detective what this does is this USB port communicates with your phone or Android tablet something running Android you run an app called tough detective and tough detective interfaces with the microcontroller or the firm management controller on the motherboard and so from that you can power off the system power it on we'll get to that in a minute there's two USB 3.1 10 GB per second ports those are the lighter colored usb3 ports four more usb3 ports two gigb L interfaces one Intel one realtech then the audio connections provided by the realtech alc 1150 codec that's a spdif optical plus analog in andout you've also got the option of USB bios flashback there's the button uh which will let you flash your bios even without a CPU you've got to have that if you know a new CPU comes out and you buy this motherboard and you get the newer CPU uh you know normally you have to boot up your motherboard in order to flash the BIOS and if you've gotten a new CPU that the motherboard doesn't support without the software update you're kind of stuck historically in the olden days you'd have to borrow somebody's old CPU boot up your motherboard Flash and then give them their old CPU back which is just a pain USB bios flashback sort of avoids that you can put your BIOS on a USB stick even without a processor installed in the motherboard it can Flash the bios so it's pretty neat the m.2 slot is hidden away in the thermal armor itself enclosed here at the bottom of the board I worry about this because m.2 drives like the new Samsung m.2 produce an insane amount of heat and and I've seen some builds that require glue on heat sinks on the Samsung to keep it cool just because there was no air flow around the m.2 slot because of the m.2 slot placement on the motherboard if you use the m.2 are you meant to replace the cover so that it's a completely enclosed situation I would probably recommend that you run without the cover if you're using m.2 also this is a pcie m.2 that means that there's no SATA connectivity in this m.2 slot but this m.2 does support the nvme breakout card which is a little card that you put in the m.2 slot that gives you a minias connector and that minias connector will carry the pcie by3 signaling to an external nvme SSD now the situation is that Intel has got these crazy high-speed nvme ssds but they're big and they're bulky and they just won't physically fit in the m.2 slot I mean really to get high capacities to fit in an m.2 slot we're going to need like 3D die stacking technology and that sort of thing to really get the memory densities up to be able to stick this in there but it's a it's a miniature pcie by4 connection so if you don't want to use a pcie SSD because you got graphics cards in the way you can use the nvme adapter in the m.2 slot to an external nvme SSD now this has been in the server space for a while uh it's technically a minias connector which is not exactly the ideal connector to carry BCI Express signaling it's not minias it's just the Minas connector and you can use that connector to carry the PCI Express Lanes to a a quasi looking you know 2 and 1/2 in SSD the Intel ones right now are about 50% heat SN so that should tell you something but I digress let's build a system so we can take a look at the UEFI and the software in terms of Hardware features first off you have three pcie by 16 physical if you're going to run a three-way Graphics config you need a case that has an extra slot below the edge of the motherboard in order to be able to support that because the last by6 Lane is the very last spot for an expansion slot on the motherboard this has to be done this way to support graphics cards that take up to three expansion slots for 2011-3 processors that support 40 PCI Express Lanes this means that you can run by 16x 16x 8 and this would be the required configuration for a three-way Nvidia setup for 28 Lane processors such as the 5820k you can run by 16x 8x4 with an AMD Graphics solution or by 16x by8 with an Nvidia or an AMD Graphics solution the first two by6 PCI E slots are gen 3 while the black one on the bottom says it's pcie Gen 2 um if you have non-graphic peripherals you can get up to by eight on all five PCI Express slots here with a 40 Lane CPU now something that I found really neat with this motherboard is a piece of software called tough detective this is actually a mobile app that you get on your cell phone and you plug in that special USB port at the back so if we go ahead and plug it in here I'm going to plug this into the Asus Zen phone 2o because surely that won't lead to problems foreshadowing and we're going to just deploy the software and run it and see what it does and this was really fiddly I had a lot of trouble with this I don't know why it actually would hard loock the Zen phone 2 fairly consistently I even went so far as to update the UEFI and it was still a little fiddly but when I did get it to work it was actually really awesome I could get the postcode the last boot status I could clear seamoss I could force a system shutdown I could do a graceful system shutdown I could read the information from the system about the memory that was installed the current fan speeds temperature voltages pretty much any information that's useful from a diagnostic standpoint you could sit there and read it and actually get it on your phone even with the system powered off you could power it on and that's that's actually exactly what we did so I think that this application it has some bugs but I think that once the bugs get worked out this is going to be really really useful so if at first you don't succeed with this application try and try again once I did get it working it was pretty stable I just don't know why I had trouble initially it was sort of weird and crashy it did lock up my phone a couple of times but then once I got it working it was actually it was actually all right it would be nice to see more controls like maybe one one button overclock or like one button toggle between you know like normal and super overclock but that'll probably come later on down the line I hope that this functionality is a Herald of things to come on future motherboards because being able to use your smartphone to do diagnostics actually is a pretty cool thing this one's uh easy tuning wizard was a little different when you click easy tuning wizard it asks you some options about your cooling situation and whether you want to optimize for power usage or performance and I just sort of clicked and let it do its thing and the end result was that my 5960x that was in there was running at about 3.9 GHz on turbo and about 3 gz all the rest of the time found the overclock to be pretty stable but I was able to push it to about 4.5 normally manually so that's that's a pretty good overclock in a 5960x it's not the greatest but it's not really that bad either and that was around I think 1.7 volts if memory serves I didn't really run Prime 95 or anything like that to see how stable it was long term because that's sort of that's sort of what I'm used to with that chip that's sort of what I pushed it to but the system was very stable even with the overclock just running through benchmarks and running through our standard Fair stuff I'd actually forgotten that I'd overclocked it I was like wow this is actually really fast I was like oh still overclocked well that would explain it I'm not sure if this is a new feature in the UEFI or not but it does have this raid configuration option so that if you've got a bunch of discs you can just hit a button and it'll configure the the uh on chipet raid that's a software raid so I tend to shy away from software raid myself but the feature is there if you use it just going through the UEFI I'm always very impressed with asus's UEFI it seems like their UEFI in terms of number of options of fine grain controls I mean the fan controls you've got these 10 pwm DC fan controls and you can control it all you've got the stuff that you can control from thermal radar too in terms of the stuff that they put in their UEFI it's crazy the amount of stuff in UEFI I mean it's a 2011 3 motherboard and so you know it's pretty modern but in terms of all of the features that they give you in the UEFI it's really you know Far and Away tons of options there it's it's always really impressive to look at it because they they have every little thing in the UEFI that you can play with and I really like it there's also really good for Linux so you can set your fan profiles and things in the UEFI and your temperature profiles and then you don't have to mess with it in Linux which is really great and so it would not be Tech Syndicate if Linux wasn't horning in on the action some way I decided to boot up Ubuntu 15.0 4 cuz I had the install stick from where I did the Ubuntu 15.04 on the Surface Pro 3 video just because carel 3.19 is fairly recent so booted it up everything worked audio worked both network cards worked the onboard peripherals worked USB 3 uh both the as media uh USB 3.1 and the uh USB 3 just regular USB 3.0 both sets of ports worked it was fine I used a memory stick to test now I'm not sure if I'm getting the USB 3.1 speeds on the as media controller I suspect that that will be fiddly cuz that's a new thing maybe it's okay I don't know I didn't test that part of it but for using a normal USB memory stick worked fine so I think I can report Linux actually works pretty well on this motherboard and I was doing a UEFI boot so I didn't have any problem booting back and forth between Windows installation on an SSD and the Linux installation on an m.2 so take that for what you will now of course if you're looking for even more control the bundled software that comes with the Sabertooth also includes uh the thermal radar 2 this is where you can get a read out of your nine different thermal sensors that are soldered on the motherboard and and the three that you can add in if you like to plug those in see what's going on this also gives you much finer granularity control of those 10 DC pwm fan headers all around the motherboard and so with this you can actually set really aggressive fan profiles another feature that I'm not I think is a new feature on this motherboard is that the fans can actually run for a while after the system turns off to help you know sort of get the heat out of the system after you turn it off so it's not just sitting there baking think think that's kind of a nice touch you can actually set your own profiles like your own behavior profiles so depending on the thermal readings from all the different sensors around the system you can control the fans individually for a tower system where you've got you know up to 10 fans being able to individually control all of the fans will help you minimize noise but still have uh you know really aggressive overclocking really aggressive you know video card cooling uh depending on what you're doing while also being able to minimize your noise because you can control each fan individ ually so you can really sit there and dial it in in terms of whatever Behavior you want as far as uh you know having the right fan kick on to cool the right component I think that's a nice touch in terms of like motherboards that have fan controllers I really haven't seen anything that has a fan control temperature control situation as sophisticated as what I see in this motherboard so given the build quality sort of the crossover between workstation and Enthusiast this is sort of a nice touch I'm also happy to report that installing thermal R2 and the entire Suite of software that that it comes with AI charger and all that is a lot easier than it has been in years past you know in years past it's really the software has been a little bit fiddly uh and a little bit crashy and so I tried to poke at it a little bit to see how things had improved and I'm happy to report that things seem to have improved as far as the software being stable and not crashy and not weird and it's always the edge cases where it would act a little bit weird or like AI charger wouldn't exactly work exactly right it seems like those problem problems have been resolved uh from just sort of testing things that had been issues on on previous motherboards so it's really nice to see that a lot of quality control and a lot of testing apparently went into this version of AI suite and thermal radar 2 software it's the sort of the whole suet of software that goes with that so that's really nice I think honestly the thing that I had the most trouble with was the uh tough detective and I think that you know some leway can be given there because that's a new piece of software sort of new functionality what else is out there that lets you control the entire motherboard and basically do you know technician level Diagnostics you know from your cell phone on a motherboard that's pretty neat I had a lot of fun with that so overall I didn't really run into anything bad with this motherboard the most disconcerting thing is that if you've got an m.2 that produces a lot of heat I don't think you're going to want to put the door on the m.2 slot I don't have one of the Samsung drives handy but we did a build with one about 6 months ago and it was really hot when we were doing the disc Diagnostics and so I would not feel com able putting one of those inside the m.2 carrier I'll have to remember to ask if they've tested that scenario and sort of what the outcome was have some friends that uh are system integrators and uh they reported that they they actually have a stick on heat sinks for some of the builds that they do with the Samsung the uh super hotr running m.2 Samsung drives and so if they're sticking heat sinks on those I just I don't know if i' if you're going to get a hot running m.2 don't put a hot running m.2 inside the armor I just don't think that's a good idea and you can monitor the temperature with your finger basically put your finger on the chips and if it's you know so hot that you have to bring your finger away that that may be a problem so make short in the lifetime of your m.2 other than that this motherboard is really solid in terms of software in terms of Linux support in terms of drivers it's actually really stable it's really good I liked it so if you've got one of these or you are thinking about getting one of these I want to see you in the forums over at Tex ind.com so I'll see you there I'm signing out for this window oh\n"