Layout

At a first glance the ASUS Gryphon Z87 looks very good with its harmonic design. Once again the ROG-colors - red, black and white - suite nicely and together with the black PCB it becomes a beautiful product. The layout itself is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allows an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.

The ASUS Gryphon Z87 comes with a digital 8+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memodry gets a stable current supply from two individual pahses. Furthermore ASUS equips this board with their so called "BlackWing Chokes". Furthermore those chokes can cope with up to 60A per phase. Furthermore there are 10K Black Metallic Capacitors, which have an average life expectancy of 10'000 hours.

On retrouve comme sur la plupart des cartes mères LGA1150 quatre slots mémoires sur la Gryphon Z87. Elle supporte officiellement de la DDR3 aux vitesses suivantes: DDR3 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz. La liste commence à être trps longue. Nous rappelons comme d'habitude de vérifier la compatibilité entre la taille des dissipateurs de votre mémoire vive et votre dissipateur processeur pour ne pas être embêter lors du montage de votre configuration. Notons aussi que la capacité maximale de mémoire vive supporté est de 32 Go et que la carte mère est au normes Intel XMP 1.3.

On the Gryphon Z87 the southbridge is being cooled by a passiv cooling block. A closer look at the area where the VRM is, shows that there are two additional heatsinks, which have been connected with a heatpipe. Like they do with every new TUF motherboards series, ASUS changed the looks of the heatsenks slightly.