The Board - A Closer Look

As part of ASUS's "TUF" line-up, the ASUS GRYPHON Z87 has pretty beefy cooling, as shown by the design of the chipset cooler above. Its large, chiseled appearance is more than enough to keep the chipset cool.


LEDs in various places around the board indicate which phase of the boot-up process the board is in, with the first two to light up being the CPU- and DRAM LED.


There is another LED for the VGA ports, and the last LED situated by the SATA ports, the BOOT LED, is for boot devices. It remains lit until the board begins loading the OS.


The main CPU FAN header on the ASUS GRYPHON Z87 has a special 4-pin PWM header that detects whether a 4-pin- or 3-pin fan is plugged in, so the fan can change the mode it is operating in to accommodate the fan type. The audio on the ASUS GRYPHON Z87 is a regular ALC892 CODEC provided by Realtek.


LAN services are provided by an Intel Gigabit LAN controller, while an ASMedia TDMS provides level shifting for the HDMI port.


Updating the ASUS GRYPHON Z87 BIOS or recovering from a BIOS failure requires neither CPU nor memory to be installed. Simply place a properly labeled BIOS file on a FAT32-formatted USB stick, plug the stick into the appropriate USB port, and press the USB FLASHBACK button shown above to have the board update its own BIOS. The LED above the button indicates what step of the flashing process the board is going through while doing so. An in-depth description of all these steps can be found in the manual. A big part of the "TUF" feature set are thermal-control features, and I found dual-sensor chips a little below the rear I/O towers to aid in that. I'll cover their functions in just a minute.


The board's bottom edge has three headers for thermal probes that aid with the thermal-control feature the ASUS GRYPHON Z87 boasts, but the actual probes themselves haven't been supplied in the box. They are a part of the separate ASUS GRYPHON ARMOR kit, an accessories package that greatly enhances the feature of the ASUS GRYPHON Z87 board.