ASUS Z87I-PRO (LGA 1150) Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The ASUS Z87I-PRO motherboard is currently selling for £122.24 and £145.99 from two of our preferred UK retailers. In the USA we weren’t able to find this product on NCIX or Newegg but they both stocked the “higher end” Z87I-DELUXE version for $200 and $190 respectively.

Overview

As our testing has shown the Z87I-PRO is a mini-ITX motherboard that brings you all the performance and connectivity features you’d expect from any other high-end Z87 motherboard. You do lose a few things over larger motherboards but there isn’t really much ASUS can do about that because this is just the nature of the mini-ITX form factor. What does matter is how ASUS have used the space available to them and they have used it very well indeed. It is no surprise that ASUS have been at the forefront of mini-ITX innovation in the past few years based on this performance alone. Even for the enthusiastic desktop user this mini-ITX motherboard offers you everything you’d need. You can run an Intel Core i7 4770K, AMD R9 290X/Nvidia GTX 780Ti, 16GB of fast DDR3, have an SSD and a storage drive with room for up to four more drives, you can have WiFi or Intel Gigabit LAN, you can have abundant USB 3.0 and 2.0 connectivity and a very impressive level of audio quality. The ASUS Z87I-PRO does not skimp on anything and for 99% of users there is going to be enough here to meet your needs if you want a high performance Haswell system.

Of course mini-ITX isn’t for everyone. The extra research and development and more compact components required to make a high performance mini-ITX cause its priced to be much higher than an equivalently spec’d micro-ATX or ATX motherboard. However, in this particular instance we can see that it isn’t that much more and ASUS have done a great job to get everything right while still keeping the cost in check. Trying to pick negatives out of this motherboard was difficult. I think the only thing you could pick on ASUS for is not offering enough variations on this motherboard design. With a mini-ITX motherboard the space constraint causes a vendor to make trade-offs, but how does it know it has made the right ones? For example some people might want to ditch the WiFi implementation to make space for an additional ethernet port (especially considering this would make an ideal network attached media player and storage device), others might want to ditch a couple of SATA ports to make room for more fan headers and so on. ASUS do offer a more affordable mini-ITX alternative, the H87I-PLUS but it doesn’t offer the Z87 chipset or overclocking so is mainly ideal for a HTPC, while this board offers both possibilities for a HTPC, gaming PC or home PC. A final niggly point to consider is the colour scheme. I know the mustard yellow/ gold isn’t going to appeal to everyone, and it certainly doesn’t appeal to me, but I can’t really mark ASUS down too much for what is my personal opinion – ASUS have managed to do a decent job of bringing gold back into fashion. At the end of the day ASUS cannot cater to everyone’s tastes but given the constraints of the mini-ITX size they have done a pretty good job of doing just that.

Pros

• ATX class performance – overclocks well too
• Easy to use BIOS
• Abundant connectivity for its size (SATA, USB, WiFi, Fan headers, Display Outputs – you name it this pretty much has it!)
• Impressive VRM for such a small motherboard
• Feature rich ASUS software offerings (WiFi GO!, AI Suite III, etc)
• 3 Year warranty

Cons

• Quite expensive (though it is relatively affordable by mini-ITX standards)

Subjective Issues

• ASUS have maybe offered “too much” for such a compact motherboard – does a user really need WiFi and LAN? Or six SATA III ports in a mini ITX system?

“ASUS have been at the forefront of mini-ITX innovation for quite some time and on this performance it is easy to see why. For once in life size doesn’t matter! Well… you no longer need a large motherboard to get epic performance. You also don’t need to break the bank quite as much as in the past to get your hands on a high performance mini-ITX motherboard thanks to ASUS diversifying their offerings to cater for more price points. If you want a high performance mini-ITX motherboard but don’t quite need (or can’t afford) the extra offerings of the Maximus VI Impact then the Z87I-Pro is a wonderful alternative.”

Thanks to ASUS for providing this review sample.