Asus Z97 Deluxe Showcase
Now to the board itself.
Asus has gone for a new desgn this time,in fact this is the design they should have gone for in my opinion.The layout is excellent considering how the pcb is packed to the brim.
The first thing that will catch your eye is the color scheme, Asus has gone from the full gold and black scheme to a champagne gold on metallic parts and black or gray for the plastic parts.
Looks way better than the last generation boards.
the back side also looks clean,no or minimum solder residue.
The cpu socket area is clean to meet the Intel specification about the DIMM distance form the socket.
The Mofset heat-sink does a good job of cooling the huge 16 Phase VRM of the board.
Both the mofset heat sinks and the PLX chip heatsink shouldn’t pose a problem for most of the coolers.So you shouldn’t have any problems with huge air-coolers like the NHD14 or deepcool assassin pr the offerings from phanteks.
The 4x 240-pin DDR3 DIMM slots support up to 32GB of DDR3 3300MHz RAM (through overclocking) Furthermore they are color coded gray and black to denote proper dual channel memory mode operation.
The easy XMP button is the hardware implementation of XMP feature in Bios,also we have the Mem OK button for easy memory configuration.
The chipset heat sink in itself looks like a medallion in brushed black and gold color scheme. Asus have gone all out for elegant designing this time, which is a welcoming departure form the last gen.
Coming to the storage side of things we have
6x Sata III slots powered by the Intel and Asmedia controllers
2x SATA Express 10Gb/s ports :
The lower one is controlled by the Intel Z97 express chipset and the upper ones is controlled by the Asmedia controller. they also double up as 2x sata III ports for backward compatibility.
And lets not forget the M.2 socket which supports Intel NGFF form factor,the only tradeoff for populating this slot is losing two PCIe x1 slots as those lanes will be used by the M.2 slot.
Coming to the lower end of the board
We have the TPU and EPU switch.
The functions of this switces as stated by asus
TPU: Flicking this switch will trigger the system to auto overclock to improve system performance. Level 1 is a modest over-clocking by the adjustment of CPU ratio, while Level 2 is an aggressive over-clocking by the adjustment on both CPU ratio and base clock speed (BLCK).
EPU: Flicking this switch will enable the EPU power saving mode automatically by lowering power consumption level of the current system.
The lower area also includes a 5 Pin TB header,CMOS reset and Bios flashback button and Q-Code LED and the standard power and reset button.
The Z97 Deluxe incorporates a PLX PEX8747 logic to help give all the integrated hardware the necessary PCI-Express lanes these need.
The slots run at X16/X8/X8 when all slots are populated.There are four PCI Express 2.0 slots as well.
we also see a new Audio solution by Asus :Crystal Sound 2
The new sound solution boasts of a few features
- Audio Shielding: Separate analog/digital signals, greatly reduced noise interference
- EMI Cover: Prevent electrical noise to affect the audio quality
- Dedicated Audio PCB Layers: Separate layers for left/right channels to guard the quality of the sensitive audio signals
- Audio Amplifier: Enhance the highest quality sound for headphone and speakers
- Premium Japan-made Audio Capacitors: Filter unnatural high/low-frequency
Next up is the back I/O,
The I/O part is fully packed up Dual GbE LAN ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, mini-DisplayPort, 6x USB 3.0 ports, 4x USB 2.0 ports, WiFi antenna connectors, optical output and of course the standard mini-stereo jacks for analog audio output.
Asus has gone for Dual Intel lan this time which is a very good move since Intel adapters are better than its counterparts.
For more information one can refer to this link for an in-depth look
And last but not the least
The WiFi/Blutooth adapter with WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and dual band support.
That takes care of the baords showcase,lets see what Asus did with the bios
