Gadgetory

hey what's up tech fans welcome back once again to another edition of tech of tomorrow I'm Miller cure host and today the co-host says once again JJ mr. a sues himself now what are we gonna be taking a look at today well today we're gonna be taking a look at the Tough Series of motherboards that's right the truck Norris series of motherboards now Chuck Norris has been to Mars that's why there's no life on Mars also you guys know Chuck Norris one time got into a battle of Superman with a loser I'd to wear his underwear on the outside so you know it's not but that one so anyways with that said we've got these cool new motherboards in front of us and JD's gonna tell us all the new specs and cool things about these boards so what's up what's up boss thank you for having me and like you talked about Chuck Norrises as a it's a hard car character and we've got a series of really outstanding motherboards it did you know that Chuck lost his virginity before his father yeah it's true so getting back to the board's a day when Alexander Bell invented the telephone three missed phone calls by Chuck Norris I'm just sayin just sayin all right I'll keep that for food-for-thought right on man you know all right so we've got two boards here and that in itself is of course really interesting because historically when we launched the Tough Series of motherboards we've only had one skew we've had the sabre-tooth so we previously have the sabre-tooth z77 now we've got the saber-tooth z87 but we're also actually gonna be introducing an entirely new skew this is going to be the Griffon this is going to be a micro ATX version for the ultimate force or the Tough Series motherboard line so um there's gonna be pretty much a high degree of consistency in terms of all the feature set the functionality the new design features that are part of the thermal armor system and they're pretty much going to be represented on both the main differentials this is going to be is one that's a micro ATX board and the other one is an ATX board so with that let's go ahead and first take a look at what we have on the sabre-tooth c87 and see how it differs from the previous generation one last question sure were these boards designed to take karate chop from Chuck Norris I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure I G we haven't integrated that yet into our qvl but you know we're working to be the frequently asked questions yeah yeah we're working on that so we can go ahead and take a look at the board here and of course right off the bat it's gotten to kind of got the classic look that you would expect in terms of the sabre-tooth feature in the internal thermal armor design but we have gone ahead and made some updates to the way the thermal armor design works so the first one is going to actually be these flow valves that we have integrated within the BRM section for the thermal design so you can see here that we can essentially go ahead and move them up and down and we can essentially close them on or off and this allows us to go ahead and control the airflow as it's either being distributed through the internal vrm assembly in its heatsink or maybe if you have your vrm pulling in air so you have maybe your top pins or in chasity serving as an intake as opposed to an exhaust and you want to go ahead and help to bring in that air to be able to cool the additional vrm further at the end of the day pretty much what we're trying to provide you here is more flexibility control about how the thermal armament system works you remember in previous generations we have kind of a shut design so essentially there's angled molded paths underneath here that direct airflow to key areas of the motherboard we even have convection holes so there's actually holes that are physically inside the PCB that allow air flow to directly pass through the motherboard and exhaust through then the back of the chassis and it come in to the back of the silicone in between all the layers of the tough armor and keep the motherboard running cool correct and so that adds us also an additional layer of cooling so when you combine that all together with of course the previous aspects of the thermal design it helps to really give us more functionality versatility at keeping your board cool and enhancing the reliability and stability now generally tough isn't segmented or focused for people that are overclocking but the board is definitely capable in terms of overclocking the same degree as our rog or our mainstream series but you know first and foremost the focus is for people that are generally looking at a longer term lifespan you know the board comes included with this certificate or reliability for recently we have our tough rated components of our such as our tough choke are tough MOSFETs and are tough capacitors and the capacitors actually have been updated these are using the same capacitors that are on our rog series so the ninja con GT 10k capacitors so when we integrate these components one thing that's very important though is that we don't want to just talk about the components being the improvement here anybody can go out and pick quote-unquote good quality components the key differential is going to be that the overall board has been validated with that design specification and those components so we take a lot of time to actually take these boards and run the for concurrent stress testing over a very long period of time where we're simultaneously using the USB the PCI Express the SATA the memory the CPU all of its getting put under load and literally we're running it for you know sometimes 14 15 16 17 18 20 days at a time to test to see how the board operates under these so really existing intensive testing goes into these areas and there's a lot more validation and reliability testing that goes into that and that's part of the reason why the cyber 2 series of motherboards offer five-year warranty now I'm going back terms of what we have here intelligible in terms of thermal armor it's pretty consistent from the previous generation we have the to assist fans that we go ahead and coorporate where we have what's called the GPU zone and the CPU zone so one would go ahead and go here and another one's going to go ahead and go in this section what I'm gonna go and do is I'm gonna bring out another board where I already have them mounted and you guys can check this out so you can see right here in the centralized area we have this set up so that goes that helps to bring air flow that will go ahead and cool the board additionally so that in this section where we of course have our graphics cards as well as our PCH area which is providing all the i/o and the information delivery to the SATA ports we can go ahead and bring in more airflow and in the vrm section you can see right here that we go ahead and have another fan which you can serve as an intake or as an exhaust so you got a lot of flexibility and of course these just like every single fan header on the board are fully controllable not only in our software but in the UEFI environment now there is an entirely new thermal radar system if you remember before tough has always had multiple sensors sprinkled throughout the motherboard to give you a full real-time kind of thermal map of how the temperatures on the board are working in response to your system configuration and how your system is responding under load so we still keep that but we've added a brand new thermal assessment tool so what it does it will actually measure the thermal response in specific zones and tell you how good your board is actually cooling that specific area so it'll say this area down here is actually getting this much this area's getting this much correct and I'll actually show you kind of like in a graph format hey you have optimal cooling or maybe you don't have as optimal cooling as you like so that maybe you can go ahead and add another fan and help to bring down the temperatures overall improve performance one thing I really like about is that you really don't touch any of the silicon at all she really did on purpose the entire board is totally protected yeah and in that respect let's go ahead and touch on one of the other new aspects which are entirely new and I'm gonna pick up the Griffin board for this perspective you can go ahead and set that guy down if we take a look right here looking at our Griffin the Griffin features an entirely new design to the Thermal Armor where we've gone ahead and extended and even advanced it further and that's so actually going to be this right here which what we call the fortifier so the fortifier one it looks cool right but there's actually some specific functionality benefits that you're gonna get with it it's going to add rigidity and minimize torsion on the board so if you've ever taken like a big heatsink and tried to install it you could sometimes over torque the heatsink and this can cause sometimes minor flexing or bending to the board over the long term that's not healthy because there are traces on the motherboard that can sometimes be damaged and if shorted out exactly so with this you're adding a bit more rigidity and a bit more torsion resistance to the board as a whole so that's going to be a nice improvement now all our PCBs use very high-quality PCB substrate material so there's very little flex as compared to competitors where they're a lot thinner and in certain situations but this just gives you kind of that other layer of confidence if we go back to let's say the ATX version which out course also preaches the fortifier design we you can even have this serve as an actual heatsink you're going to see right here that it's actually making direct contact with the vrm heatsink so it's giving you additional cooling on top and below under the arm yeah correct the hottest part of the BRM is your MOSFETs and your drivers and this is directly making contact with that to help to go ahead and pull heat away from that and actually disperse it across this actual entire section so that's another benefit that the fortifier gives you another one is just from the physical hanging perspective like you talked about there's a lot of direct solder points that you have here that get created during the production of the motherboard and sometimes when you go ahead you make contact with that you can Nick you can cut you can scratch your fingers so it just makes it easier to handle so when you've got us more ergonomic yeah when you factor that all together you know not only does it look cool but actually provides some really nice benefits now in terms of what we've done with rounding out aspects to be able to provide additional reliability and durability to the product is we've extended on what we refer to as our dust defender design if you remember in the previous generation we added these cool covers to be able to go ahead and protect your slots and this was important because sometimes over time people don't realize that you get dust debris dancers up in there yeah it can actually fill up in there and you can short out your ports if you go ahead and install a graphics card sometimes it can actually conduct static electricity you can get a number of different variables so this just hopes that not only one look at your protection but it helps to just provide that additional layer of security in terms of making sure that all your ports are protected and so we have that for all the PCI Express slots we even have it for the front headers if we go to the back of the board you can see that we even have dust defenders for every single back i/o port even including your audio so you really only need to go ahead and remove the ones that you're actually going to utilize and if you're not utilizing that port you can go ahead and just cover it up and keep it dust free and make sure that it's entirely protected so we think that that's another nice point we of course continue to provide it for the memory and overall that gives you a great form of protection when you talk about thermal protection protection from the you know different types of particulates our elements that are floating throughout your chassis and building up that could compromise the integrity when you then factor that in of course with all the high-end component quality and everything else that tough brings to the table in terms of advanced monitor and cooling really special board now rounding things out of course we keep all the standard design ASIS design points that we'd expect so we got you know the USB 3 boost technology we have the USB charger technology we've got our fan expert so all those things are going to continue to be there plus some awesome new UEFI options which we want you guys make sure to check out the video that we're gonna do in terms of ufi options now lastly in terms of the thermal armor you're gonna see that we have these cool little thermal probes so the motherboard itself has a whole bunch of fixed thermal probes that give you real-time temperature mapping but for this generation there's going to be three thermal probes that you can also a fix to the motherboard and you can go ahead and position these anywhere you want you can put them maybe over your hard drive inside your chassis on the back of your graphics card and you can always have a real-time baseline temperature for that device or wherever you have this thermal rose how many of those in there are three of them included so that's another nice value point for people that really care about kind of monitoring the system making sure they're getting optimal cooling in performance then you can go ahead and utilize these and there's even nice little touches like this where for the i/o shield right we have of course the classic q shield which is pad which helps the block electromagnetic interference plus it's softer to touch so it's easier to install but we've even added a cool little fab filter so that if you want to go ahead and more easily service this when you have it installed you can go ahead and take the little fan filter out clean it off and you don't have to worry about having larger built-up particles actually when you're on the back of the board on the back of the board so nice little touch now for the Gryphon skew for you guys that are going to be interested in this micro 2x version you do want to keep in mind that here we're showing it to you with the entire thermal armor design already in place but when you do purchase it it will just be the board by itself to hit a more aggressive price point we're going to be offering the board without the thermal armor design but we're gonna actually be offering this really cool armor kit so the armor kit will come included with everything you would need to be able to equip your board fully with the fortifier the armor all these key accessories to be able to take advantage of it you can just go ahead and purchase this and then integrate that onto your migrate to exhibition so JD the sabre-tooth board that it will come with all this pre-installed and everything it's it's only the Griffon board that you need to buy it separately correct that's correct the Griffon board will come without the thermal armor without the fortifier but you can get the actual Griffon kit here which will include everything as you can see right here all the covers in terms of your dust defenders for your PCIe slots they'll have all the covers for all the dust defender for your i/o ports the fan even include this little screw driver so you can go ahead and get everything all installed for you so that'll all be included inside of a box that you can go ahead and purchase as an option for the Griffon SKU so overall you know if you're looking for a really great board you know and you're looking more towards generally a longer-term build right you know not necessarily as focused at overclocking you just want a great solid board you know you do a little bit everything you know you kind of maybe do some gaming maybe you do some general productivity you're online downloading music you just kind of want to solid a good quality desktop but you want to be able to take advantage of monitoring advanced cooling technologies you know that's where tough is going to be in mind for you not to mention that for those people out there who are looking to build a custom build unlike a military-type theme this board fits right in on that with the colors game yeah short I mean definitely there's always been a complimentary kind of ethos in terms of you know a military vibe with the tough series especially with the military components that go through that validation process but you know at the end of the day we feel that the features said on here is always first and foremost target at users that are interested in reliability monitoring and cooling and of course they're looking for that extra layer of Asus functionality whether it's in the fan controls the UEFI are the great power delivery options that we're offering right on just all kinds of good stuff coming with this I can't wait till these things come out like I said before our tech camp team announced he really loves all of the Tough Series that's like he always builds every new new set that comes out he builds a themed model off it so I'm sure we'll be seeing a system built off one of these real soon as well so alright folks that's it we've got a lot some more stuff coming out at the house will release I'm Mel Rick this is JJ and we'll see you guys back here on Tech tomorrow you