ASUS Z97I-PLUS (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging Since the popularisation of mini-ITX motherboards a few years ago (if I remember correctly they took off with the Intel 6 series chipset) the price of mini-ITX motherboards has been falling sharply. However, combined with that falling price has also been rising quality, increasing innovation and more features - particularly with ASUS mini-ITX motherboards. Irrespective of which motherboard vendor you prefer it would be fair to say ASUS have driven a lot of the mini-ITX innovation over the past few years. Today we're looking at the culmination of some of this innovation, but for a respectably low price of just $160. Enter the ASUS Z97I-PLUS which is one of the new ASUS Z97 motherboards that has ingenious ways of taking advantage of all the great features we've come to expect from a fully fledged PC. ASUS have managed to cram M.2 on the board by moving it underneath, they've added a WiFi AC and Bluetooth 4.0 module, equipped four SATA III ports, included fairly high quality ALC 892 audio and offered up the latest Intel Gigabit LAN. Despite the motherboard's size you still get a fully fleshed out rear I/O and an impressive 6 phase VRM. On paper the ASUS Z97I-PLUS looks like a very impressive Z97 mini-ITX motherboard so let's proceed on with our review to see what the product and its performance has in store for us! Packaging and Accessories The flagship selling point of the ASUS channel series is the quality of the motherboards: this is clearly denoted in terms of compatibility, reliability and protection mechanisms. Moving round to the back of the box and we can see the specifics of those claims made on the front. If you're looking for even more details you can find those on the product page right here. Included with the motherboard is well laid out and presented user guide, a driver and software DVD and an ASUS case badge. The accessories include the wireless antenna for the AC module with connecting cables, two SATA cables, a labelled black rear I/O and a revised version of the "Q connector" which is essentially an extension cable for the front panel connectors. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis The layout on a mini-ITX motherboard isn't something you can go too wrong with because everything is so compact. However, there are still important decisions to be made and I think ASUS have got them right here. Firstly the fan headers are all clustered in one place which makes sense and is useful for cable management. Secondly, the bulk of the connections are located in one convenient location down near the bottom left. Finally, ASUS have chosen to relocate a lot of the components under the board, as well as doing nifty things like vertically mounting the CMOS battery just to make sure it all fits on! All in all the layout is complex, but it makes sense, and the density of what's been crammed on here is very impressive. Down along the bottom of the motherboard we find the front panel connectors, the USB 3.0 header, four SATA III ports and the motherboard 24 pin. Moving to the edge we see the main PCIe lane, a MemOK! button, the mPCIe combo card and a very small PCH heatsink. The opposite edge hosts the 6 phase VRM and its cooling heatsink as well as the 8 pin EPS connector. At the back of the board we find a TPM header (which is unlikely to be used by anyone, ever, period. why is it even there?!) and three fan headers. The white fan header is for the CPU fan. The CPU socket dominates the entire centre and we can see a lot of the components encroach near or on the socket area so CPU cooler compatibility is something you'll want to double and triple check. The rear I/O has the following ports: 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port(s) 1 x DVI-D 1 x D-Sub 1 x DisplayPort 1 x HDMI 1 x LAN (RJ45) port(s) 4 x USB 3.0 (blue) 4 x USB 2.0 (one port can be switched to USB BIOS Flashback) 1 x Optical S/PDIF out 3 x Audio jack(s) 2 x Wi-Fi antenna port(s) Under the bottom of the motherboard we can see a huge density of components which show just how tight space is. More importantly for the end user the bottom is where the M.2 port is located, this is the only way ASUS have been able to fit the M.2 port on so I think it will be welcomed by users. 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 the new Z97 chipset comes a new ASUS UEFI 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. New additions of note compared to Z87 are 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. All in all the ASUS UEFI demonstrates its usual flexibility towards both "basic" users and "advanced" users with a wide range of options that you can play with, or just leave on auto. Either way the choice is yours and that's what is so important here. I think what's also worth pointing out is that this BIOS is identical to the ones found on larger Z97 motherboards - just because this is a mini-ITX motherboards it doesn't mean any compromises have been made with functionality which is great. 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. ASUS Home Cloud One of the advantages of being able to have Bluetooth, WiFi AC and Intel Gigabit all on the same tiny platform is that it opens up the way for a potentially very powerful network attached computing system. The ASUS HomeCloud software is really nice because it allows to easily create and manage this in a variety of ways. There are three aspects to ASUS HomeCloud: ASUS Media Streamer ASUS HomeCloud Server Wi-Fi GO! With ASUS Media Streamer you can make the PC a media server for music, photos and videos from which it can be accessed over LAN or via an internet gateway if you use an ASUS HomeCloud server account. To use the ASUS HomeCloud server aspect while you're on-the-go you'll need to register and set up an account. You can even sychronise this with your ASUS WebStorage ID if you already have that type of account from another ASUS device like an ASUS tablet or convertible for example. This account will allow you to manage your PC more effectively from remote locations. The third pillar of the ASUS Home Cloud is the well established Wi-Fi GO! software. This offers up the usual functions that you can see below. These have been present on ASUS motherboards for at least 2 generations if I remember rightly but "if it ain't broke then don't fix it" as the old saying goes! Overclocking Overclocking with this ASUS motherboard was a breeze. We managed to get our chip's maximum of 4.8GHz by using a manual voltage of 1.27. This voltage held constant under all forms of load which signifies the strength of the ASUS digital power delivery system (DIGI+ VRM). We expect that users of this motherboard will have no trouble taking the new Devil's Canyon CPUs to their maximum overclocks. This motherboard may only have 6 phases but remember not all phases are created equal! ASUS ones are often among the best. 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. Linear Read Linear Write Random Read Random Write 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. For our WiFi tests we do the same except we connect the test system to the ASUS RT-AC68U router via WiFi at a distance of 2 metres from the router. 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. Ethernet 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. Ethernet WiFi 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, 48KHz (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). The graphs are sorted by the first VRM Heatsink temperature as this is normally where most of the CPU VRM phases reside. Final Thoughts Pricing In North America the ASUS Z97I-PLUS currently retails for $159.99 at Newegg and $179.99 at Amazon. In the UK it sells for £114.99 on Amazon, £110 at Scan Computers and £115 at Overclockers UK. The ASUS Z97I-PLUS comes with a three year manufacturer warranty. Overview Having already reviewed the ASUS Z97-A motherboard the similarities between that and this motherboard are pretty evident. Both motherboards share the same ALC 892 audio codec, the same Intel I218V gigabit ethernet controller, both use on the Z97 chipset for SATA, M.2 and USB provision, both use brown PCBs and both offer broadly similar performance at a very similar price. Of course the ASUS Z97I-PLUS loses a lot of the extra PCIe connectivity just out of the sheer size but in essence the ASUS Z97I-PLUS is just a "boiled down" or "condensed" version of the ASUS Z97-A. This is a very good thing because we absolutely loved the ASUS Z97-A and so naturally we're also very fond of this motherboard too. I think the "ASUS advantage" with a motherboard like this comes from the comprehensiveness of the complete ASUS package. Not only do you get a great performing motherboard at a reasonable price with solid specifications but you also get what is probably the best software suite out of all the motherboard vendors. While motherboard software has a bit of a bad reputation you really need to experience the ASUS Z97 motherboard software to see that it actually adds useful and new features that make you go "wow I didn't know my motherboard could do that". I think the ASUS HomeCloud software is particularly exciting because it makes all that connectivity (WiFi, ethernet and Bluetooth) come in useful for something. On that note that's also one of the "bonus features" this motherboard has that you really wouldn't expect for the price point - the WiFi AC and Bluetooth 4.0 combo card. I won't even bother going on a witch hunt with this motherboard trying to find things I didn't like because to be honest most of the issues are a result of the motherboard's size, which can't really be helped. ASUS have already done an excellent job in cramming so much in: I think for me discovering the M.2 port underneath the motherboard was the icing on the cake. However, because I want to offer a balanced viewpoint I will bring up a few of my concerns. Firstly, I think ASUS should have opted for the higher quality Realtek ALC 1150 codec, even if it meant adding a little extra to the cost. Secondly, I think the WiFi module should have had the antenna ports built into the rear I/O, instead you have to connect the cables to the antenna and to the mPCIe card inside and feed those cables through a pop-through hole in the I/O shield which is hardly ideal. Thirdly, the heatsinks get very hoty under load, again this is a result of the size particularly for the PCH heatsink which is absolutely tiny (but has to be to fit in such a tight space). Finally, the TPM header seems like a waste of space. I'd much rather ASUS ditched that in favour of more fan headers or just more of something else that people might actually use. I can't remember the last time I heard of anyone ever using a TPM header but maybe that's just me living in some kind of bubble. Pros Excellent software suite Full ATX-level performance Impressive pricing Miraculous M.2 inclusion WiFi and Bluetooth combo card Cons Rear I/O needs better antenna placement Audio could be improved with ALC 1150 TPM header seems like a waste of space Heatsinks get quite hot, especially under overclocking "The world of mini-ITX motherboards is still fairly niche but ASUS have demonstrated that there is always room for innovation and improvement in this exciting form factor. The ASUS Z97I-PLUS raises the bar for mini-ITX motherboards yet again and it does so at a surprisingly affordable price point." Thank you to ASUS for providing this review sample.