Yeah. I've officially been converted to an ASUS guy. It's all your fault Rob, for sending me to these events! Comparing everything I've seen to my experiences with Gigabyte... I'm done accepting the issues I've had with GB boards.
I can use 8 DIMMs at speeds of 4 DIMMs? That is awesome. With 8 DIMM motherboards looking to be rather popular for this platform, I hope other manufacturers will jump on this dedicated Digital VRM for DIMM bandwagon also.
Yep, and I cannot underscore this enough. I couldn't list specifics in the article, but there is plenty of proof behind this statement!
BIOS flashing... which can be done without a CPU even installed into the board. Amazing. I've had at least three experiences in the past two years where this feature really would have come in handy. Yes, only three experiences, but given I need to install an old CPU first to update the BIOS, and then the new one... a feature like this would have saved a lot of hassle.
When I got my Gulftown chip, I installed it into a new system build right away, pressed the power button... and nothing. The system wouldn't POST and I had to unmount my waterblock and open up the case, and fumble around to install the old Core i7 920 so I could flash update the BIOS. That was a ton of extra work and time wasted, and made all the more irritating given it was a new motherboard and Gulftowns had been on the market for eight months!
As a side note, this flashing ability is thanks to the TPU, it provides the CPU functionality required to make this work.
The Sabertooth looks absolutely gorgeous... (what!? That is important too!). I'm sure it goes very nicely with my office earth tones. All I need now is military green RAM and a brown GPU. But not mahogany. Or pine. Oak. Oak would be fine, thank you. Please ship to my usual address
You will get your wish, I distinctly noticed one unique Corsair RAM kit plugged into one of the Sabertooth boards... it matched the color scheme very well.
On another account... Is it a given that this 8xDIMM setup with the 90 degree rotated CPU will present serious clearance challenges to the new line of big air coolers we've been seeing? I'm probably mistaken, but boy, those DIMMS seem way close for the sides of some of these coolers. And while they won't be facing a fan anymore, that back platting will... and seems very high on some cases.
It might pose an issue for the largest coolers, but most coolers that can fit on an X58 board should not have an issue here either. The pinout for the cooler mount itself is still square, so anyone can rotate the coolers whichever orientation they want, unlike AMD's rectangle cooler mounts. That said, every system I saw was using a self-contained Corsair waterloop, so I didn't see too many extreme air cooler examples firsthand yet to be sure!
Also, I did mention the ROG series will be using the X-socket feature... I'm sure it can be applied to waterblocks and air coolers as well... it's a feature I hope ASUS will consider including in its Deluxe boards in the future!
