ASUS’s Sabertooth motherboards have been a big hit since they were introduced, so there was no doubt there would be a Z87 Sabertooth with ASUS’s new line of Z87 motherboards. This board is of course built on the LGA1150 socket and supports Intel’s Fourth Generation Core Haswell processors. The Z87 Sabertooth still keeps the cool Thermal Armor that everyone loves, but adds on to it with the TUF Fortifier backplate. In addition to that you have things like the Thermal Radar 2, Flow Valve and Dust Defender. For those wondering about specifics this board features two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots (x16 and x8 electrical), a single PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot (x4 electrical) and three PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots. There are 4 DIMM slots with memory support of up to 32 GB of DDR3 memory, eight SATA 6GB/s ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports and a plethora of other connections. Read on as we take a look.
Special thanks to ASUS for providing us with the Z87 Sabertooth Motherboard to review.
Packaging
The Z87 Sabertooth comes in a nice retail box. The front of the box remains pretty clean, although it does have the TUF logo, which if you didn’t know stands for “The Ultimate Force”. The back of the box goes into great detail on some of the main features of the board as well as giving you an overview and outline of the I/O ports.
Opening the box up everything is nicely protected inside. Getting it all out you have the Z87 Sabertooth motherboard, 2 bags of SATA cables, I/O shield, SLI connector, a bag of TUF components, Q-connectors, user’s guide, driver CD, accessory installation guide, and certificate of reliability.
For a full unboxing of the Z87 Sabertooth motherboard check out our video below.
In Japan this (pretty good) board (with over a dozen software updates online already [complicating things]) only gets a ONE YEAR Warranty; via the Official Amazon ASUS Retailer.
I bought one and went to register it in English (and to join the owners club for added content); but was refused as there is no registration code. ASUS will not supply us in Japan/Asia with a 5-year warranty on paper (there is NO WARRANTY CARD supplied with the board as you get in USA/Europe/Australia/New Zealand/Canada/Russia etc).
We are discriminated against as customers/consumers?
They wrote to me and indicated that `IF` there is an international problem with the boards that I might have the right to claim a replacement board during the five years; but that would be difficult to process.
We get a ONE Year LIMITED Warranty here.
The Official ASUS Amazon retailer actually only provides a ONE MONTH IMMEDIATE REPLACEMENT WARRANTY if the board fails.
After that we have to go to ASUS direct; and that is hard; due to customers getting NO WARRANTY CARD and NO REGISTRATION Number.
So; the MARKETING IS MISLEADING.
They blamed me for reading in English on an English site for any oversight (via e-mails).
If you can read chinese~Japanese KANJI they may have their claims on ASUS Japan; but I dont read the near impossible; especially anything technical that fluent Japanese mostly cannot understand in computing either.