Layout

With the release of Intels Z87 chipset ASUS' design team chose to bring quite some change to the table with their classic series motherboards. ASUS was brave enough to ditch their black/blue color scheme. Nowadays their cash-cow-series features a black/gold/yellow color scheme. It is our personal opinion, that black/gold/yellow might not attract an audience as wide as black/blue. Black/Gold/Yellow is a very aggressive combination and we strongly believe that black/blue is a much better choice.
Regarding the layout ASUS has been managed to arrange this motherboards features nicely 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. Apart from that the build quality of this board is reasonable and it suites the price range.



ASUS equipped the Z87-A with an 8+1 phase VRM design whereas the CPU can rely on 8 phases and the memory gets one phase. 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. A closer look reveals, that the manufacturer is using capacitors of lower quality than the ones you get with for example the Deluxe series motherboards. Apparently ASUS decided for a compromise in order to push the price down.



Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Z87-A. Officially supported are DDR3 - 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz 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 cooling solution, where there are two heatsinks covering the different parts of the power design. The PCH is equipped with a passive cooling block. The aluminium blocks around the CPU socket are rather small so there is obviously plenty of space between the CPU socket and the heatsinks to install big aircoolers easily.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Bioshock: Infinite
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 7	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1