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So, I was reading some rather old articles on the performance "gains" from the original Sabertooth board that showed very unimpressive thermal decreases in the range of 1-2 degrees C. The first time I saw one of these boards, the first thought that popped into my head wasn't wow I bet that runs cool; but more along the lines of I bet that looks great with proper modular cable management.

Several years have passed now since that first TUF boards and unsurprisingly ASUS is still making them and a few other board makers are either copying the design or getting more elaborate with their I/O shields and giant heat pipes. The real question is, has anybody done any thermal testing on these "lately", and has 5 years of tweaking the tech actually turned it around to make the $100-$200 premiums remotely justifiable.

In context, I am building a PC that has very poor air flow. There are two 120mm intakes on the right (top) of the case and the psu pulling air out on the left (bottom) with a few passive vents on the top panel and above rear i/o. Do to my limitations, there are a few steps I can do to compensate for the airflow restraints. Immaculate cable management, use an nvidia stock gpu cooler to pull air out, space out PCI cards as wide as possible, low height RAM, and add an after market low profile 140mm CPU cooler that will cool a large area surrounding the socket. But one thing I have always wondered about is how much gain is there from TUF armor in these circumstances. If I have one area of the board that is getting less airflow and more heat build up than other areas, just how much of that heat will be displaced by the armor. Or is this all still just one big marketing gimmick like painting a racing stripe on your car to make it go faster.

That to me doesn't sound like poor airflow. Imperfect, maybe. Can you link the exact case you are using?

As for the TUF stuff, I have one in operation. But I couldn't tell you if the added accouterments are doing any more of less cooling than my Sniper M5. They both are within +- 1% of each other.

I could link the case but the case isn't so much the problem as the entertainment center than the case is located in (covers up other available 120mm locations. My current build is using the same case I plan to make my new build in, and even on the older equipment the thermal levels are tolerable. My real goal here is to increase cooling efficiency so that I can slow down the fans and drive down decibel levels. Now maybe the TUF armor creates less wind obstruction and add some vibration dampening that will (cooling aside) lower noise in the process too, but when it comes down to airflow and db, it is going to vary so much from one build to the next that generalized study information isn't going to be that valuable. That is primarily why I am focusing more along the question of whether modern heat shielding actually does much to displace heat.

I bought a asus z77 sabertooth a few years when it was new , still running it now . IMO that thermal armor is nothing more then marketing hype . I removed all that "armor ' from my board and it has been running fine for years . I saw no real difference in temps in having it on vs taking it off .
just my 2 cents

Anovoca wrote:

I could link the case but the case isn't so much the problem as the entertainment center than the case is located in

Gotcha.

Anovoca wrote:

That is primarily why I am focusing more along the question of whether modern heat shielding actually does much to displace heat.

From my experience I would say no.

Yeah, I heard a lot of the same sentiments about the original Sabertooths. I have a feeling that not much has changed, but then again, I don't want to speculate. For all I know they could have changed the material, add more fins or heat-pipes under the armor or increased the amount of contact points between the armor and the board.

The TUF armor only helps cool the board if you use the included fan.... or at least that was the case with the Z68 demos I viewed. I assume newer models still include a fan because plastic by itself isn't going to diffuse heat, only insulate. The armor was intended to be paired with an included optional chipset fan.