Layout

With the release of Intels Z87 chipset ASUS' design team chose to bring quite some change to the design of the classic series motherboards. ASUS was brave enough to ditch their black/blue color scheme. Nowadays their cash-cow-series feature a black/gold/yellow color scheme. It is out personal opinion, that black/gold/yellow might not attract an audience as wide as black/blue was able. Black/Gold/Yellow is a very aggressive combination and we strongly believe that black/blue is a much better choice. We sincerely hope that ASUS will soon release their classic series motherboards with black/blue color scheme next to the black/gold/yellow line-up, since those were some of the most beautiful motherboards, that were ever avialable. We also believe that the black/gold/yellow was a poor descision and it will affect the sales numbers of ASUS' classic series motherboards and ASUS might even lose marketshare, since they wont be able to catch all the customers with the Sabertooth and ROG boards.
Regarding the layout ASUS has been able to squeeze an astonishing number of features onto a standard ATX motherboard. Obviously ASUS is compliant with Intels guidelines regarding clearance around the CPU socket. There even is some margin between the CPU socket and the DIMM slots.

ASUS equipped the Z87-Deluxe Dual with an 18+2 phase VRM design whereas the CPU can rely on 16 phases, the integrated graphics unit gets two phases and the memory gets its own two phases. Furthermore ASUS put a digital power design on the board, which comes meanwhile in the fourth generation. With their digital power design they promise that it emits less electromagnetic radiation than its analogue counterpart. Therefore ASUS claims that the system stability can be enhanced even further, especially during extreme overclocking.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Z87-Deluxe Dual. Officially supported are DDR3 - 2800 (OC) / 2600 (OC) / 2400 (OC) / 2200 OC / 2133 (OC) / 1866 (OC) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 with up to 32 GByte capacity. The DIMM-slots aren't too close to the CPU socket which means that you can install even todays largets cooler. Obviously you have to double check compatibility when you use DIMMs with very large heatspreaders.

The power design is being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution, whereas two heatsinks are being connected. The PCH is equipped with a passive cooling block. The aluminium blocks around the CPU socket are quite big but still there is plenty of space between the CPU socket and the heatsinks to install big aircoolers easily.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Layout
Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery	Page 5 - Connectors and I/O
Page 3 - Features	Page 6 - Conclusion

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