Asus Z87-A review
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
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.
Basic Specifications | |
---|---|
Rating | ***** |
Processor socket | LGA1150 |
Form factor | ATX |
Size | 220x305mm |
Processor support | 4th generation Intel Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7 |
Processor external bus | 100MHz |
Chipset north bridge | Intel Z87 |
Chipset south bridge | Intel Z87 |
Passively-cooled north bridge | yes |
Integrated graphics | No |
Supported memory type | DDR3 |
Maximum memory speed | PC3-24000 |
Memory slots | 4 |
Maximum memory | 32GB |
Dual-channel support | yes |
Buying Information | |
Price | £100 |
Supplier | http://www.dabs.com |
Details | www.asus.com |
Internal Ports | |
Power connectors | 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX |
PCI-E x16 slots | 3 |
Dual graphics architecture | Quad-GPU SLI, quad-GPU CrossFire X |
PCI-E x4 slots | 0 |
PCI-E x1 slots | 1 |
PCI slots | 2 |
Fan headers | 5 |
Floppy ports | 0 |
IDE ports | 0 |
Serial ATA ports | 0 |
RAID chipset (max disks) | Intel Z87 (RAID 0, 1, 5, 10) |
Features | |
Wired network ports | 1x 10/100/1000 |
Sound (ports) | Realtek ALC892 (6x analogue out, optical S/PDIF out) |
USB2 ports / headers | 6/8 |
Firewire ports / headers | 0/0 |
Legacy ports | PS/2 |
Other ports | VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI |
Cables included | 2x SATA |
Brackets included | none |
Software included | none |
Setup and Overclocking | |
Voltage adjustment | CPU/RAM/Chipset |
CPU clock max adjustment | 8,000MHz |