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Asus Z97-Deluxe Review part 1

Sumon Pathak

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Introduction
Asus has a long-standing tradition of producing quality motherboards at a price.
Today we will be taking a look at the Z97 Deluxe form its upcoming lineup of Z97 lineup.
We will be looking at the Features and other information related to the motherboard only for now since most of the details of the chip-set and performance numbers are still under Intel’s NDA as of now.

 Lets check out what in the box, shall we?
The motherboard comes in a black big box with a sleek design with special mention of the five way optimization that Asus brings to table with this generation.

Other prominent features of the board such as the Wi-Fi GO!, Turbo App, Crystal Sound 2 and Turbo LAN are highlighted at the rear of the packaging.

Looking inside the box we see a nice package including


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

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

Why Intel Lan is better

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

Asus Z97 Deluxe BIOS
Asus has gone for a complete redesign on bios with an improved step by step way for the anyone with minimal knowledge

the fun part is that the EZMODE gives an estimate as to how much it can be overclocked.

Coming to the advanced part

Asus has kept the same black/gray layout.
also they have included a nifty help test features at the bottom of the screens. i will let the screenshots do the talking for now since the Bios screens are pretty much self explanatory

 
Asus Z97 Deluxe motherboard software

Now let’s take a look at the Software side of things.

AI suite: the proprietary software has gone a few re designs

I will let the pictures do the talking for the most part with inputs as needed

as you can see the home screen is different form the previews generation. Every important option has been condensed in the first page in form of click-able links for easy access.

The overclocking options are governed by TPU

Voltage regulation and load line calibration is controlled by DIGI+ VRM along with some other stuff

One new feature in this revision is the Turbo app which in essence overclocks the system and prioritizes audio and network activity when a predetermined program is launched.

i will close this one with a few more AI Suite screenshots

So that all for the part 1 of my Asus Z97 deluxe review, i will post the benchmarks in a while..till then enjoy and leave your opinion.

I will be holding my ratings till i finish the full performance testing.

Signing out

Sumon

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