ASUS Z97-K Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 17.03.15Page:
Conclusion
| Overall | + | - | |
| At a first glance the Z97-K leaves a good impression. You get a reasonable feature mix and it won't take long until you realize that ASUS created a decent product, which is available for a very reasonable price. Since this is an entry level Z97 product, there is only a four phase power design. In terms of storage connectivity there are six straight SATA connectors and an M.2 slot. In case of the color scheme we're happy to see that the new Z97 Classic-Series from ASUS isn't as flashy as the Z87 motherboards anymore. |
- Design - Layout - M.2 Slot - Price |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| On this board there are no angled SATA connectors. In this case you could usually run into compatibility issues with long graphics cards, but ASUS positioned the SATA ports wisely, so this is not going to happen, except you'd be using a triple slot card in the second PCI Express slot. Unfortunately there are no power- and reset buttons and there is also no CLR-CMOS button. What we liked for instance is the fact, that there are six SATA ports, as well as an M.2 slot. Furthermore the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots is well thought an therefore nothing needs to be criticized at this point. Another good thing with this board is that there is plenty of space between the CPU socket and the heatsinks on the power design as well as between the CPU socket and the DIMM slots. | - Space around the CPU socket | - SATA connectors not angled
- No Power/Reset-Button onboard - No debug display |
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| Performance |
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| Let's have a closer look at overall 3D performance. Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the bottom quarter of our comparison tables. Concerning the average of all 2D benchmarks the results are similar to the ones in our 3D benchmarks. Overall we would love to see ASUS improve the performance of this board. On another note we had a look at power consumption and in this case we see that the values in idle are good and the ones under load are average. |
- 3DMark Vantage - PCMark - SuperPi 32M - SiSoft Sandra Memory bandwidth - SiSoft Sandra Memory Latency - Metro Last Light - Bioshock: Infinite |
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| BIOS |
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| As you might have expected from ASUS you get an excellent BIOS which offers not only lots 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 |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a very aggressively priced Z97 motherboard, then the Z97-K can be a good choice. Checking Geizhals we find this particular model listed for 103 Euro, which makes it actually cheap. |
- Office
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Z97-K good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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