ASUS Z97-A (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging After a lot of messy NDA politics between Intel and the main motherboard vendors the launch day of Intel's Z97 Express chipset is finally upon us. In respect of our relationship with Intel we have been holding off with publishing our reviews until now and today we have a couple of reviews for you. The first is the entry level ASUS Z97 motherboard, the dash A model. This motherboard will be hitting the market at a fairly affordable £115 or $150 price point making it an attractive price point for entering onto Intel's new enthusiast Z97 platform. Despite the ASUS Z97-A being fairly affordable it still gets most of the features we will see on higher end motherboards such as M.2, SATA Express, Intel Gigabit LAN and all the new ASUS Z97 (Channel) software features we looked at a while back including the new AI Suite III package with the ASUS Turbo App. Let's start by taking a closer look at the specifications of the ASUS Z97-A: Packaging and Accessories A new motherboard chipset brings a new channel style to the ASUS packaging. We can see yet another major colour scheme and style change a shift from the gold/yellow of the last generation to a more subtle silver/gold. We have also risen up from the 4 Way optimisation on the Z87 series to 5 way optimisation provided by the new Turbo App built into AI Suite III. The back details some of the new ASUS Z97 Channel features which we covered in a lot more detail here, you can also find them explained further on the ASUS Z97-A product page. Included is a user guide, feature booklet and driver/utility DVD with Intel case badge. Accessories include three SATA III cables, of which one is right angled, a plain metal rear I/O, ASUS Q connectors for your front panel connectors and a SLI bridge. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis The ASUS Z97-A is a very nice looking motherboard and a very well laid out motherboard. In my opinion the SATA ports are well placed, all the front panel headers are also in ideal locations with all on-board switches easily accessible on the edges of the board. The CPU 8 pin and motherboard 24 pin are both in ideal locations too. ASUS have located the M.2 slot in a clever place because you can use either the M.2 slot or the two PCIe X1 slots, not both at the same time (a chipset limitation) so the M.2 slot doesn't clash with any PCI connectivity. I'm also very impressed that ASUS offer two CPU fan headers, most budget boards normally only offer one which means you'd need to buy a splitter if you had a dual fan CPU cooler (or a pump/fan AIO). My only criticism would be that I would have liked to have seen the USB 3.0 header mounted along the edge at a right angle with the SATA ports to allow for more optimal cable management. The CPU socket makes use of an 8 phase VRM with fully digital power delivery. ASUS are using an "8 Phase" design but it has 4 PWM drivers, 8 chokes and 8 caps compared to their higher end boards which get 8 PWM drivers or more. The board is fairly compact so you'll need to watch out for memory clearance with your CPU coolers. SATA Express comes with this motherboard but if you have no need for SATA Express you can use its two SATA ports like normal 6Gbps SATA III ports. You must set SATA Express mode from within the BIOS to use it, the same applies for M.2. There's a shed load of connectivity at the bottom of the motherboard and a power switch! That has to be a first for such an entry level motherboard, I'm glad to see all these features gradually trickling downwards as ASUS has always promised. The PCI Express lanes are well spaced, any user of this motherboard should have adequate space to use all their expansion cards. Also take note of the fairly advanced sound implementation with a separated PCB, I didn't think we'd be seeing that feature passed down to the entry level any time soon. The codec is still the same as the Z87-A, Realtek ALC 892, but this codec should perform better given the optimisations in place. The new colour scheme of grey/gold is quite a sophisticated look and this board really looks a lot more premium than the price would imply. The CPU VRM heatsinks are fairly modest but still look sizeable enough to get the job done. The rear I/O is well fleshed out for the average user. To me the display connectivity seems a little OTT given most people will be going for a discrete video card, I'd like to have seen a couple extra USB ports replacing some of the display connectivity. The PCB is a dark brown colour, much like what we saw on MSI's budget Z87-G43 late last year. I think while brown isn't desirable, I'd much rather have brown than blue, green, yellow or red. The Test System and Test Software Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to review our test system and thank those sponsors who kindly provided us with test equipment to make our work possible. We offer our thanks to: Intel for supplying us with a Core i7 4770K processor, which we reviewed here. Kingston for supplying us with a Hyper X 3K 240GB solid state drive, which we reviewed here, and the Hyper X USB 3.0 DTHX Flash Drive, which we reviewed here. Corsair for supplying us with a Hydro Series H100i liquid CPU cooler, which we reviewed here, and a Vengeance Pro 16GB 2400MHz memory kit, which we reviewed here. Be Quiet for supplying us with a Straight Power E9 680W power supply unit, which we reviewed here. Plextor for supplying us with a 256GB M.2 solid state drive, which we reviewed here. Sapphire for supplying us with an AMD R9 290 Tri-X graphics card, which we reviewed here. ASUS for supplying us with an RT-AC68U wireless AC gigabit router, which we reviewed here. Patriot for supplying us with a Wildfire 120GB solid state drive, which we reviewed here. Lian Li for supplying us with a PC-T60A test bench. Noctua for supplying us with NT-H1 thermal compound. Rosewill for supplying us with an Infrared thermometer. Test System Motherboard: varies by review CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K processor GPU: Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X graphics card RAM: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB 2400MHz kit (CL11, 2 x 8GB) Cooling: Corsair H100i with Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound Case: Lian Li PC-T60A test bench Storage Drives: Kingston 240GB Hyper X 3K SSD, Patriot 120GB Wildfire SSD, Kingston Hyper X 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive and Plextor 256GB M6e M.2 SSD PSU: Be Quiet Straight Power E9 680W Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 Networking: ASUS RT-AC68U router Test Software SiSoft Sandra Engineer - available here. WPrime - available here. Cinebench - available here. 3DMark - available here. Bioshock Infinite - available here. Tomb Raider - available here. AIDA 64 Engineer - available here. DPC Latency Analyser - available here. Rightmark Audio Analyser - available here. LAN Speed Test Lite - available here. Passmark - available here. BIOS With a new chipset comes a new BIOS design, it is great to see ASUS going back to the drawing board and bringing in some new features because everyone likes positive change. Of note is the interactive fan curves and the EZ Tuning Wizard. The new fan curves in the BIOS essentially bring Fan Xpert III functionality from the Windows environment into the UEFI arena while the EZ Tuning Wizard has been updated to account for cooling and what kind of performance the user wants. Feel free to have a good look around the UEFI BIOS pictures below and see what you think. I'm not so sure how useful the EZ Tuning Wizard is, from my experience I got the same overclock predictions when picking a box cooler or a water cooler. However, for an affordable entry level Z97 motherboard the UEFI is very nice and has a tonne of advanced tweaking features you just wouldn't expect at this price point. Software Overview Home Screen Moving into the software and as we mentioned the new focus is the Turbo App, the fifth pillar of the ASUS optimisations - in addition to TPU, EPU, Fan Xpert III and DIGI+ VRM. Turbo App Within the Turbo App you can pick your Applications (exe files) and set performance, audio and LAN profiles for them. For example you might pick Battlefield 4 and set a profile that gives it high LAN priority, a gaming audio profile and a CPU turbo. TPU With the TPU not much has changed although we've got a redesigned interface and the ability to tune each core individually which is pretty cool. This is useful for applications that are single threaded. Fan Xpert III Fan Xpert II has become III and it offers an extended fan tuning range to allow you to get even quieter operation. As usual there is an automated fan tuning wizard that gives you full control once it has calculated the capabilities of each fan. EPU The EPU has been given a little facelift and you can now integrate the Windows power plan controls into your EPU settings allowing you to control when the monitor gets turned off, when the system sleeps in addition to the other EPU controls on things like the CPU clock speed and hard drive activity. DIGI+ VRM The DIGI+ VRM now allows you to pick your CPU Power Phase control from within your OS which paves the way for better in-OS overclocking too. USB 3.0 Boost USB 3.0 Boost makes another appearance but their isn't much that appears to have changed here. The main benefit here is still from having a UASP capable USB 3.0 device. Turbo LAN Turbo LAN is a joint ASUS-CFOS project that allows you to packet prioritise your applications. Overclocking A new chipset doesn't bring anything new to overclocking because we're still CPU limited and we still have the same CPUs as Z87 - that's until Haswell Refresh K series CPUs arrive a bit later on in Q3 this year. That said the ASUS Z97-A's 8 phase CPU VRM was easily capable of reaching 4.8GHz which is the maximum our chip can achieve before it reaches thermal throttling on our H100i. The overclock we dialled in used 1.3 volts but we could go as low as 1.27 volts on this board suggesting the quality of the VRM is high. CPU Performance Cinebench CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's CPU performance. Cinebench R15 is a totally free utility and is available for download here. WPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. SiSoft Sandra The SiSoft Sandra Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks are widely used measures of compute power and performance for a wide array of real world usage scenarios. You can find out more details on these tests here or download SiSoft Sandra here. GPU Performance 3DMark 3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark's latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here. Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a popular action-adventure video game published by Square Enix based on the Tomb Raider franchise. The game was released in 2013 and as of March 2014 had sold 6 million copies. Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third instalment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release. Memory Performance For our memory tests we use the built in memory benchmarks in AIDA64 Engineer and SiSoft Sandra. For more details on each of the benchmarks please see here and here respectively. AIDA64 Engineer SiSoft Sandra Combined Latency Test SATA, M.2 and USB Performance To test the storage performance in our motherboard reviews we use AIDA's Disk Benchmark utility built into their AIDA64 Engineer Edition software package and run a variety of read and write tests. We run each of the benchmark tests on a SATA III, USB 3.0 and M.2 device. For SATA III testing we use a Patriot WildFire 120GB SATA III SSD, for USB 3.0 testing we use the Kingston Hyper X 64 GB USB 3.0 flash drive and for M.2 testing we use Plextor's 256GB M.2 M6e SSD. The drives are always formatted before use. Networking Performance For our networking tests we connect the test system up to our Intel Gigabit enabled ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79 motherboard test system through the ASUS RT-AC68U router and run our tests. We opted for this over a direct point-to-point connection because we wanted to simulate real world performance. LAN Speed Test Lite LAN Speed Test was designed from the ground up to be a simple but powerful tool for measuring file transfer, hard drive, USB Drive, and Local Area Network (LAN) speeds (wired & wireless). It does this by building a file in memory, then transfers it both ways (without effects of windows file caching) while keeping track of the time. Download the free Lan Speed Test Lite utility from here. Passmark Performance Test 8 The PassMark Advanced Network Test (which is part of PerformanceTest) is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers must act as the server and will sit waiting for a connection. The other computer acts as a client. It connects to the server machine and sends data to it for the duration of the test. You can download a trial version of PerformanceTest from here. Audio Performance RightMark Audio Analyser (RMAA) RMAA suite is designed for testing quality of analog and digital paths of any audio device. The results are obtained by playing and recording test signals passed through the tested audio path by means of frequency analysis algorithms. A more common mark is also provided for those unfamiliar with measured technical parameters. Available here. We run the RMAA test using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable connecting the line out to the line in to test the quality of the motherboard audio codec not any external audio devices. We run the complete playback and recording test at default settings and then get RMAA to interpret the results giving the below outputs. We sync the playback and recording audio devices to the same setting as the test for accurate results. 16 Bit, 44KHz (DVD Quality) 16 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) 16 Bit, 192KHz (Studio Quality) DPC Latency Analyser Thesycon’s DPC Latency Checker is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs. Available here. Power Consumption and Thermals Power Consumption To measure power consumption we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different use-case scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading. Thermal Performance To measure the thermal properties of each motherboard we take the temperature of three different locations using a Rosewill infrared thermometer. We measure the hottest point on the PCH (chipset) heatsink, the first VRM heatsink (which is closest to the rear I/O) and the second VRM heatsink (which is closest to the RAM lanes). Final Thoughts Pricing The ASUS Z97-A has an MSRP of £115 or $150. It is currently selling on Amazon and Newegg for $150 and it comes with a 3 year ASUS warranty. Overview It is quite honestly difficult to believe that the ASUS Z97-A is only the entry level motherboard for the ASUS Z97 range. I can quite honestly say that in every way the ASUS Z97-A delivered solid performance making it a smart choice for any Z97 user, and when I compare it to the ASUS Z87-A it is easy to see the significant leap in quality and performance that has occurred without a corresponding leap in price. Even if this board isn't specifically targeted towards gamers, prosumers or enthusiasts it is able to do a bit of everything and appeal to everyone by offering a solid range of connectivity, a rich feature set and more importantly an attractive price point. In terms of performance numbers the ASUS Z97-A is as good as any Z97 or Z87 motherboard currently out - sure it is more limited in terms of connectivity but most people will find the Z97 chipset alone offers more than enough for their needs. Of course should you need more USB ports, more PCI Express lanes, more SATA ports, dual Gigabit LAN or better quality audio then some of the ASUS ROG and higher end models like the "Deluxe" variant may appeal to you. However, the Z97-A doesn't skimp on anything you might need and for that reason I can see the ASUS Z97-A being an absolute favourite among system builders and budget conscious consumers. In terms of finding negative aspects of this motherboard, well it's a fairly difficult venture. Of note the only things that didn't impress me were the brown PCB, sub-optimal USB 3.0 header placement and slightly high VRM heatsink temperatures. The bundle was also fairly sparse but I guess that's one of the trade-offs that is made to bring this board in at a competitive price point. However, all of these things are really minor details and certainly do not detract from the overall picture which is that the ASUS Z97-A is just a brilliant motherboard for the money. I think it will be interesting to see how other motherboard vendors can respond at this very competitive price point. Pros Abundant connectivity Intel NIC Solid audio Cost effective Sensible layout Impressive performance Cons Brown PCB VRM heatsinks could be more substantial Sparse bundle "The ASUS Z97-A motherboard sets an impressive standard for Intel's new Z97 platform. ASUS have raised the bar higher than ever with an extensive range of software options, abundant connectivity, quality component selection and high performance. If you're looking for a sensible, affordable and good all-round entry into the Z97 platform then the ASUS Z97-A has you covered." Thank you to ASUS for providing this review sample.