Cooling

Beyond the fairly obvious features of the TUF series of motherboards like the armor protection that goes over and under the motherboard and the high quality components used to be able to guarantee the board for at least 5 years there is it’s cooling. One of the best features of TUF series boards, and the reason we use one on our cooling test rig, are the thermal radar sensors that are placed all over the board. There have been debates in the past about how effective the cooling could be on a motherboard with armor covering part of it. In an overclocking situation the armor might be a limitation, but at stock speeds the board is in its element. How do they handle that though?

As you can see, under the optional armor the Gryphon has fairly capable cooling. This is considerably better than the cooling on the mainstream Pro and Plus boards we already took a look at. Asus went with a brown and black theme all around on both the chipset cooling and the PWM cooling.

With the optional Armor on you really can only see the chipset heatsink down next to the PCIe slots. The armor over the rest of the cooling does have a few small air vents but most of the cooling is handled through the rear I/O panel through a small high RPM fan. Another key feature of the Gryphon is its three additional temperature sensors. Because we did our testing on a test bench I just tucked a sensor in between two of the power chokes.  They already have a built in sensor, but I wanted to see how the temperature sensors worked. In a typical situation you would actually place these sensors around your case on things like your hard drives. The included software will actually raise your cases fan speeds to help cool down components that you have these sensors attached to even if the CPU or motherboard is running nice and cool.