Armor Installation
In the past the TUF series of boards have come with the Armor already on the board so it was a little interesting to see that you have to pick it up apart from the motherboard. But after thinking about it, I can see how not everyone is interested in all of the armor, the longer warranty and highest quality parts are important features for a lot of people and splitting them up means a lower cost to people who don’t want everything else, or maybe they can’t afford the armor now but can pick it up later when they have more money. Another interesting thing that came to mind was now case modders will be even more willing to paint and modify the armor. I have seen TUF Series boards used in case mods a lot because the armor can be painted to match the case to make things even more eye catching.
Anyhow, once I had the board and the armor out of the packaging I took a peak at the instructions and was surprised that the installation doesn’t take as long as I expected. The basic idea behind it all is similar to a sandwich where we have top and bottom armor pieces and the motherboard is directly in the middle like a big juicy piece of turkey. So the first step you take is laying the top armor on your table upside down and dropping the motherboard onto the armor (lined up of course). Next you take the bottom armor and line it up by matching the location of the TUF Fortifier logo to the TUF logo on the bottom of the motherboard and place it on the motherboard. From there you use the included screwdriver to install all of the screws that hold everything together. Once you get those screws installed you are actually a good portion of the way done. Now you need to install the rear I/O fan, this attaches to the removable cover and Asus has even included a second cover in all of the parts for this armor kit. Once screwed in you just need to add the sticky piece of foam to the bottom of the fan to keep it from vibrating up against any of the motherboard components.
From there you just have all of the various plugs to install into ports that you don’t plan on using. For us I was able to plug all but the one PCI Express x16 slot and our two extra RAM slots. I didn’t install the rear I/O plugs because this board is going to be on our test bench getting used for various things for the next year. But if you know you won’t need to use any ports you can plug them up as well. The Dust Defenders are an interesting way to protect your board from dust, debris and dander and static discharge.
When opening up the armor I was a little overwhelmed at all of the parts but once you figure out that most of those parts are connection and slot protectors (AKA Dust Defenders) it’s not too bad. I had everything setup and installed in less than 20 minutes.