Features:
The Sabertooth P67 board is a combination of great visual BIOS and high quality hardware components(military grade). It's fantastic to work with both in the physical installation of the components as well as the BIOS management and overclock settings. The board is well endowed with SATA3 inputs of both the 3GBs variety and the faster 6GBs type. The construction feels sturdy without being so rigid as to cause fear when locking in the CPU cooling systems.
Thermal Armor-
Hype to sell units or truly effective cooling advantage? That is the question I had. I decided to update my review and add this information because it's frankly a pain to test yourself. I checked the cooling with and without the thermal armor sleeve on the motherboard. I was shocked to see that with the "armor" on it was about 3-6C cooler in some areas, even without the optional motherboard fan in place. My original hypothesis was that the sleeve was actually going to trap hot air inside and increase the temps. Glad to see I was wrong. I do recommend adding the optional motherboard fan (most are pretty quiet), as this will help bring even lower temps to the board.
The Included Software-
I am thrilled with the software included with the Sabertooth motherboard. Normally I am the kind of guy that throws the disks that come with new hardware out the window yet in the case, I find that I use some element of the software on an almost daily basis. The Thermal Radar allows you to see the temperatures at the 12 monitored sites on the board, while making fan speed adjustments as you deem fit. Very cool. The AI charger will allow you to charge your USB devices faster than ever; while the DIGI VRM program allows you to make overclock and voltage adjustments on the fly within your operating system.
Conclusion:
This is a really great board. There are many benchmarks indicating this board is a fantastic cornerstone for your Sandy Bridge PC system. The "TUF armor" looks nice and gives the board a slightly austere and sleek appearance. If you order this board you may want to look into picking up an optional fan to cool the tough armor. In order to accomplish this you want to search for a 50mm fan- which will attach to the motherboard for additional cooling.
PRO:
-Performs as well as some boards that are way more expensive (Bench marks test indicate its on par with Maximus Extreme etc) .
-Great looking motherboard (if you are into that)
-B3 revision with fixed Cougar Point chipset
-Fantastic BIOS utility
-Nice feature set for price point
-Included software tools are useful
-Plenty of I/O ports
-Front and Rear USB 3.0 configuration
CON:
-50 mm fan to aid in heat dissipation is not included
Questions? Feel free to leave a comment and I will reply as soon as possible.
My System Specs:
CPU: Sandy Bridge Core i5 2500k, Overclocked to 4.4ghz, Antec Kuhler 620 H2O CPU cooler.
Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth P67
Hard Disks: Corsair F60 SSD (boot device), WD-Velociraptor 150gb , WD Blue 1TB
GPU: 2 x SLI -MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
MEMORY: G-Skill 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (overclocked)
PSU: Antec New True Power 750W Modular Power Supply
CASE: Silverstone Raven-02EW ASUS SABERTOOTH P67
Fast and Stable!
The BIOS allows for some extremely detailed tweaking but also has an "idiot proof" mode for the more casual tweaker. The automatic memory clocking fail safe is a nice feature.
At first I thought the "thermal armor" was a gimmick but it has actually helped quite a bit for controlling airflow and keeping the board cool.
Five year warranty is a plus!
For me, it was a tossup between this and the P8P67 DELUXE but, in the end, the cheaper price point and odd aesthetics won me over. Currently running my 2500K at 4.33Ghz stable and cool on air (Zalman CNPS9900A) with only very minor tweaks.
One thing to note - things are very cramped on the edge of the board farthest from the CPU - a double-wide video card in this slot may brush against the USB cables. With an open fan, this could be an issue, especially if your case is small.
A motherboard to rule them all, I can't find anything wrong with this one, absolutely nothing.. From the moment I fired my new build up it performed flawlessly, I had no issues with it whatsoever. Sure there are more expensive options out there for the 1155 build but honestly the differences aren't immense to compensate for the price.
The motherboard performes checks at startup to make sure everything is plugged in appropriately. There is a red LED indicator by the PCI 1 Express slot, by the Memory, by the CPU, and by the SATA connections for the boot drive. It cycles through these checks and if anything wasn't plugged in all the way or there is a compatibility issue it lights up. The only thing that lit up for me was the Boot device LED which is normal on a new build since there is no info on the HD and booting is automatically set for HD.
As far as temperatures are concerned and the thermal armor, the mobo manages well. Even before I put in the 50mm assist fan. All temps were arount the 30-45C range throught the board and after installing the fan I saw a 5-10C drop most components under the thermal armor. My current setup is in a Thermaltake Armor A60 which manages temperatures well itself.
The ASUS AI Suite you get with it is excellent as well, aside from the mouse interfaced BIOS system that's amazing on its own, the AI Suite allows you to monitor Temps, Fan speeds, Voltage and tweak settings of the board while in the OS.
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Currently sitting in the Thermaltake Armor A60 with:
Intel Core i5 2500k Processor
8 GB of Corsair Vengence DDR3 Memory
XFX Radeon 5640 1GB DDR5
650 GB WD Hardrive
Antec H2O CPU Khuler
Corsair TX650 PSU
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Excellent board, and I highly recommend it! - Sabertooth - I7 - Sli'
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