ASUS Z97-Pro Gamer Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 27.11.14Page:
Conclusion
| Overall | + | - | |
| The ASUS Z97-Pro Gamer is available for about 132 Euro. The price is reasonable but not low. This board offers a well-tought feature mix in combination with an attractive design as well as good build quality. The Z97-Pro Gamer is basically ASUS's entry-level offer regarding the companies gaming motherboards. | -
Design - Features |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically the ASUS Z97-Pro Gamer's Layout has been well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors and apart from those there is even a SATA-Express port as well as a M.2 slot. The latter two greatly add to the storage flexibility of this board. Unfortunately there are no power and reset buttons and there is also no debug LED. Overall the decision to cut these features from the list is understandable, since a board that's not being used for overclocking doesn't really need these buttons. When it comes to expansion slots, there are three full-size slots, where the first one is a PCI Express x16, the second boasts x8 and the third x4. Apart from that there are two PCI Express x1 as well as two legacy PCI slots. | -
Angled SATA
connectors - Space around the CPU socket - Placement of PCI-Express x16 Slots - Display connectors |
- No power/reset buttons | |
| Performance |
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| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks 6th in our comparison tables, which includes values from all Z87 motherboards we've tested too. When taking the average of all 2D results the Z97-Pro Gamer comes in on an excellent 3rd place. If you keep in mind, we're comparing the performance of 44 boards here, ASUS has really done an astonishingly good job regarding this entry level gaming board. | -
2D - 3D - Power Consumption |
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| BIOS - Overclocking |
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| 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 - Design |
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| Recommendation |
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| The Z97-Pro Gamer is a really good board if you don't want to rob a bank before building a gaming PC. Therefore we can definitely recommend this board for competitively priced gaming rigs. | - Gaming - Multimedia - Price |
- High-End | |
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Z97-Pro Gamer very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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ASUS Z97-Pro Gamer Preview |
ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark 2 Review
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