ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

The Gryphon under ASUS’ TUF series has always been their Micro ATX option for those who like smaller things, the tradition continues with the Z97 chipset model.

ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

NOTE : Click on the image to view the larger copy.

The board itself is beautiful, with ASUS’ black and brown color scheme from the TUF series, this time it comes with military camo even on the heatsink.

Surrounding the CPU socket is a rather large heatsink but nicely design to not be obtrusive, within the confines of the heatsink you’ll see the TUF 10K Ti-Caps and TUF New Alloy Choke

ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

As for the DIMM slot, it’s pushed closer to the CPU socket to accommodate more additional TUF 10K Ti-Caps.

ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

The board comes with 6 x SATA 6Gb ports but no SATA Express nor M.2 connectivity.

ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Interestingly though, the board comes with 3x PCI-E slots, the first and second one being on x16 but operates at x8/x8 in multi-GPU mode. The last one is of PCI-E x4.

ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

I’ve no idea why the need for that many PCI-E slots, I’d rather have an M.2 connector than additional PCI-E ports as Micro-ATX setup rarely run dual card.

Lastly, the I/O ports at the back of the board that I need not elaborate.

ASUS TUF Gryphon Z97 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

More details at the official product page