ASUS SABERTOOTH Z170 MARK 1 Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅18-09-15
Thermal Armor Cooling - Does It Really Work?


The TUF Thermal Armor stands out as one of the primary features of SABERTOOTH Z170 MARK 1. Not only does this Thermal Armor protect the motherboard, but ASUS claim it will provide a more efficient method of cooling components. ASUS say the following:

"TUF Thermal Armor is more than a futuristic shield: it employs dual fans to provide maximum airflow and rapid cooling board-wide, and a new interior shunt design to boost air cooling to the M.2 slot. Reversible-airflow technology blows dust up and away from the heatsink VRM, while the exclusive flow-valve design controls the heat-pipe's air contact — great for liquid-cooling setups."

Sounds great doesn't it? But does adding the supplied cooling fans really work? Well, we have installed the 35/40mm cooling fans in the designated locations -- middle and rear IO. In this test the idea is to ascertain whether there is any improvement over system temperatures when the cooling fans are detached and installed. The test involves two 30 minute runs using AIDA64 Stability/Stress Test. After 30 minutes have expired, we then take a screenshot of the ASUS Thermal Radar Software which highlights a wide selection of temperature recordings. This should demonstrate the validity of the Thermal Armor design with its cooling fans.



The results whilst not ground-breaking, show marginal success for ASUS. We expect the results to be even better when the motherboard is placed within a computer chassis with good airflow (We used the Cooler Master Test Bench). One thing to note, with the small cooling fans exceeding 6000RPM there is noise to contend with but thankfully this can be adjusted.

18 pages « < 8 9 10 11 > »

Comments