Asus Z87-A review

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.

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.

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.

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.