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

A Closer Look

The ASUS Z87I-PRO is small and incredibly complex. It is just amazing to see how much ASUS have crammed into such a small space.

The ASUS Z87I-PRO has a rather complicated CPU socket area. As you can see they’ve managed to cram in a rather large VRM.

Here you can see more closely that 12+2 Digi+ VRM which means you’ve got a fully fledged overclocking motherboard despite the mini-ITX size.

There are also four fan headers located near the rear I/O. They all have Fan Xpert 2 support and of course if you wanted to hook up more fans you could use some fan splitter cables to do so.

ASUS have had to be very smart with their placement of key features. The 24 pin and 8 pin sit right next to each other which saves space around the CPU socket area but also works out quite nicely for cable management.

All six SATA ports are spread out around the corner of the motherboard. While cable management could get a bit tricky if you have more than 2 drives, with systems of this size most people will only have two drives anyway.

The USB 3.0 header is tucked away behind the PCH, rear I/O and PCI express lane. There’s also a USB 2.0 header and CMOS battery (mounted upright to save space!).

The rear I/O as we mentioned is absolutely packed. four USB 2.0, DVI out, a clear CMOS button, a BIOS flashback button, optical S/PDIF, HDMI out, Display Port out, six USB 3.0, Intel Gigabit LAN, WiFI antenna outputs and three audio jacks.