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Asus Z87-A review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £100
inc VAT

Excellent performance and a wide range of ports and expansion slots make this a great Intel board for Haswell processors

Specifications

LGA1150, ATX, Intel Z87 chipset, supports: 4th generation Intel Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7

http://www.dabs.com

If you’ve yet to make the jump to Intel’s fourth-generation Core processors (Haswell), the Asus Z87-A is a fantastic ATX board for a new build.

For expansion, there are three PCI-E x16 slots available. The first slot supports the PCI-E 3.0 standard, so this should be your choice for a single graphics card. The second slot shares bandwidth with the first slot, giving you two slots running at x8 speed for dual graphics cards (Quad-GPU Nvidia SLI and Quad-GPU ATI CrossFireX modes are supported). The third slot runs at x2 speed, so this is best used for expansion cards alongside the PCI-E x1 slot and two legacy PCI slots.

Asus Z87-A

There’s a great range of ports available on the back panel, including four USB3 ports with another two available through the board’s USB3 header, two USB2 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a legacy PS/2 port, an optical S/PDIF output and six 3.5mm audio jacks for 7.1 surround sound.

Its four display outputs also give you plenty of flexibility in arranging your displays, as you can either daisy-chain three Full HD displays from its DisplayPort or use its VGA, DVI-D and HDMI outputs simultaneously to power three monitors instead. Its HDMI and DisplayPort outputs also support maximum resolutions of 4,096×2,160 so you can take advantage of 4K monitors.

Asus Z87-A

There are four DDR3 memory slots that can hold a total of 32GB of RAM at a maximum speed of 3,000MHz when overclocked. This gives you plenty of flexibility if you want to try and get more out of your system, and its six SATA3 ports also ensure that all your drives will be able to perform to their highest potential as well.

We tested the Z87-A with a Core i5-4670K and 4GB of DDR3 RAM running at 1600MHz. It scored 115 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which is actually a few points higher than what we’d normally expect to see from this setup. This puts it just ahead of the similarly-priced Gigabyte Z87-D3HP and even the more expensive Z87-Pro, so you can be sure the Z87-A will give you great multimedia performance.

Asus Z87-A

Even better, the Z87-A comes with several extra features to make it more user-friendly than its rivals. We particularly liked its onboard DirectKey that lets you access its easy-to-use BIOS straight from standby and its MemOK! Button and LED light that helps with troubleshooting, and Asus’s bundled Q-Connector kit was a godsend when trying to connect our wires to the board’s front panel.

The Asus Z87-A is a tiny bit more expensive than its rivals, but not so much to cause concern given its brilliant performance and range of expansion ports. It wins a deserved Best Buy award.

Basic Specifications

Rating*****
Processor socketLGA1150
Form factorATX
Size220x305mm
Processor support4th generation Intel Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7
Processor external bus100MHz
Chipset north bridgeIntel Z87
Chipset south bridgeIntel Z87
Passively-cooled north bridgeyes
Integrated graphicsNo
Supported memory typeDDR3
Maximum memory speedPC3-24000
Memory slots4
Maximum memory32GB
Dual-channel supportyes

Buying Information

Price£100
Supplierhttp://www.dabs.com
Detailswww.asus.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots3
Dual graphics architectureQuad-GPU SLI, quad-GPU CrossFire X
PCI-E x4 slots0
PCI-E x1 slots1
PCI slots2
Fan headers5
Floppy ports0
IDE ports0
Serial ATA ports0
RAID chipset (max disks)Intel Z87 (RAID 0, 1, 5, 10)

Features

Wired network ports1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports)Realtek ALC892 (6x analogue out, optical S/PDIF out)
USB2 ports / headers6/8
Firewire ports / headers0/0
Legacy portsPS/2
Other portsVGA, DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI
Cables included2x SATA
Brackets includednone
Software includednone

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustmentCPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment8,000MHz

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