ASUS Z87I-Pro Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 14.08.13Page:
Conclusion
| Overall | + | - | |
| At a first glance the Z87I-Pro definitely leaves a good impression. You get convincing feature mix and it won't take long until you realize that ASUS created a product, which should feature a reasonable price tag. Apart from the excellent power design there are no other overclocking features onboard, which is one reason why ASUS has been able to reduce cost. Instead you get for example six SATA connectors, which makes this board perfectly suitable for small file servers or powerful HTPC's. Next to that it is obviously also possible build a quick mini-ITX gaming rig based on this board. We won't talk too much about the new color scheme. In our opinion it is a pity that ASUS ditched black/blue for black/gold. | -
Design - Layout - mini-ITX |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Basically the ASUS Z87I-Pro's Layout has been well thought. In order to make more space on this tiny PCB, ASUS deployed a daughter PCB's, where you can find the power design. Furhtermore the straight SATA 6Gbps ports have been placed at the only locations where it makes sense to have them, when you look at this point from the accessibility perspective. Another thing we like are the four 4-pin fan header on the left side of the CPU socket. Even removing graphics cards is easy, since there is a lever, which is well accessible when a VGA is mounted. |
- Space around the CPU socket | ||
| Performance | + | - | |
| Let's first have closer look at overall 3D performance. Calcualting the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this comes in fourth in comparison tables. Concerning the average of all 2D performance, this board scores again fourth place. Furthermore, when we dig deeper into the individual results, we see that this board offers consitent performance. On another note we had a look at power consumption and in this case we see that for a mini-ITX board it's quite high. Basically it needs as much power as an enery efficient ATX motherboard, but since there are a lot of features, these results are easy to understand. | -
Sleeping Dogs Low - Metro Last Light High - wPrime 1024M - SuperPi 32M - SiSoft Sandra Memory Latency - SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth - 3DMark Vantaghe - 3DMark Fire Strike |
- Sleeping Dogs High | |
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| As you might have expected from ASUS you get an excellent BIOS which offers not only a boatload of tuning and tweaking options but is also very easy to use. Especially with the entry screen ASUS is trying and also succeeding to add elements which make the BIOS much easier to use also for unexperienced users. For example the feature that the boot order can be changed by drag'n'drop is a neat addition. | - Clear arrangement - Sheer amount of options | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you're looking for a high-end mini-ITX motherboard, then there is no way around the ASUS Z87I-Pro. This board offers a flexible feature mix and it's even reasonbly priced. | -
Enthusiast build - File-Server - Gaming - HTPC |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Z87I-Pro very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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