Asus Z87-C (Z87) Motherboard Review

The full ATX board features a brown PCB with gold heatsinks and mustard yellow components, yet still has a nice spaced out layout of components and doesn’t look too cluttered.

Around the CPU socket we find two very small gold passive heatsinks helping to keep the vital components at a safe temperature. Some fan headers are located nearby and a single 8-pin ATX power connector delivering the juice directly to the CPU socket.

Moving towards the chipset, another golden heatsink using a passive design and subtle Asus branding. Nearby to this are the SATA ports and not much else, due to the simplicity of this board.

Moving north, we find four DIMM slots operating in dual-channel mode. Two are brown and two mustard colour to differentiate the channels and support up to 32GB of DDR3 memory modules with speeds ranging from 1333MHz all the way up to 3000MHz overclocked. There is also support for Intel Extreme Memory Profile modules. Nearby we also find the standard 24-pin ATX power connector and a native USB 3.0 header for those with USB 3.0 ports on their chassis or front panel devices.

Moving over to the expansion slots, we have two PCI-Express x1 slots (yellow), two PCI-Express x16 slots (one yellow/one brown), and three legacy PCI slots. The two PCI-Express x16 slots do support AMD CrossFireX technology, but not Nvidia SLI. It’s a bit disappointing to see so many legacy PCI slots, compared to other similar boards on the market which have SLI support and a variety of slots, but for a budget board, this is generally expected.

At the bottom of the board, we find the usual buttons and headers, from the left we see a Thunderbolt header, audio and SPDIF above it, COM port, DirectKey button, TPM header, three USB 2.0 ports, fan header and the typical front panel header for your chassis buttons and LEDs.

Storage wise we see a total of six SATA 6Gb/s ports of which four are vertical and two angled to the side of the board. They all operate from the Intel Z87 chipset and support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 and include the latest Intel technologies including ISRT and Smart Connect Technology.

Lastly moving around to the rear I/O panel, we find (from left to right) a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA and DVI connectors, four USB 3.0 ports (Intel Z87), Gigabit LAN (Realtek 8111GR) and six auxiliary sensing jacks providing 8-channel Realtek ALC892 High-Defintion audio.