Gigabyte Z87N-WIFI review

The Gigabyte Z87N-WIFI is a Mini-ITX motherboard that’s compatible with Intel’s Socket LGA1150 Haswell processors such as the Core i5-4670K that we used during testing.

Although small, it has many features that make the most of the Z87 chipset and your case, including four SATA3 ports, two USB headers (one of which is USB3), and a front-panel audio header. Of course, we’d prefer to have the six SATA3 ports that the Z87 chipset allows, but that number might be a little excessive if you only plan to use the Z87N-WIFI in a tiny HTPC case.

On its backplane are four USB3 ports, two USB2 ports, a single PS/2 port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, five analogue ports and one S/PDIF digital audio output. These ports, together with the headers mid-board, should be enough connections for most users. Also on the backplane are three graphics outputs in the form of two HDMI outputs and one DVI-I output. You can also install a graphics card in its single PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slot, which is handy if you plan to build a compact gaming system.

As implied by its name, the Z87N-WIFI has a built-in Wi-Fi module compatible with the 802.11n standard on the 2.4GHz band. To use it, you must connect the supplied antenna to the board’s backplane. Although the Wi-Fi adaptor is handy, we prefer the Wi-Fi adaptor of the Asus Z87I-Pro, which is dual-band and is compatible with the newer and faster 802.11ac standard.

With a Core i5-4670K and 4GBs of memory installed, the Z87N-WIFI scored 108. This is slightly less than the 112 overall score we saw when we used the same processor in Gigabyte’s excellent Z87-D3HP, but it’s still good. Plus, you can either overclock the board manually or select an automatic overclock from a drop-down list in its UEFI BIOS. Should you prefer, you can change the UEFI screen to a traditional BIOS interface.

We applied a 4.6GHz overclock and saw an overall score of 116, which is hardly the best score the Core i5-4670K can produce.

Annoyingly, the Z87N-WIFI doesn’t have indicator LEDs, or even a basic light to tell if you if the board is receiving power. We also found the board a little cramped compared to the Z87I-Pro, which seemed to have more space between onboard elements such as RAM slots, expansion slots and processor socket.

The Z87N-WIFI is a decent enough board, but we’d much prefer to pay a little extra and buy the Best Buy-winning Asus Z87I-Pro. It has six SATA3 ports, a better Wi-Fi module and more USB ports and fan headers. If your budget can’t stretch to the Z87I-Pro, then the Z87N-WIFI is a perfectly adequate Mini-ITX board for your Haswell processor.