Board Layout and Pictures
Last year Asus dropped their blue color scheme for their mainstream boards and went with a gold design with a little bit of teasing from some enthusiasts. This time around, they have stuck with the gold color scheme but toned it down slightly to more of a champagne color that looks a little classy. I still don’t think the color will go as well with some builds as the blue did, Asus has refined the gold look a little and they continue to set themselves apart from the competition that was also pushing the blue theme at the time. Let’s take a look around the board to see what Asus packed into the Z97-A.
Typically I would do two photos of the top section of a motherboard but with the Z97-A there is just the 8-pin power connection over on the left so I bundled it in with the right side of the board. For power, we have the 8-pin as well as the 24-pin power connections, nothing out of the ordinary here. Up above the four DDR3 DIMM slots we have two 4-pin PWM fan headers for the CPU cooler. Along the right side edge, Asus included their MemOK button that you can use when having memory compatibility issues to get your PC booted. There is also a new switch called EZ XMP that automatically turns on your memory XMP settings without having to jump into the BIOS. There are two more 4-pin PWM fan headers above the 24-pin power connection and just above the PCI Express slots over on the left of the photo giving us 4 so far. In the bottom right corner of this photo we also have a USB 3.0 header for those front panel USB 3.0 ports.
Lastly, in this photo we can see our M.2 port. M.2 is a small form factor implementation of the SATA Express interface and the replacement for mSATA. With this connection, you can add a small PCB that will give you a SATA Express connection or you can connect M.2 SSD’s. If you don’t know what SATA Express is, it is the latest in connection type that combines two SATA 3 ports along with a third smaller port to increase overall data transfer up to 10 Gb/s, exactly what we will need to break past the performance of our current day SSD’s.
Down along the right side Asus has put all of your SATA connections. We end up with four SATA 3 connections as well as a single SATA Express connection. Including that SATA Express connection should help keep this board relevant for a long time and allow you to take advantage of tomorrows high speed SSDs.
Down in the bottom right corner we have a lot going on. First, we can see both the TPU and EPU switches. As mentioned in the past the EPU is an on board controller that helps turn things down to lower power usage. TPU is similar but it bumps performance up slightly, although not as much as you can get by manually overclocking. We have two more 4-pin PWM fan headers giving us a total of 6 on the entire motherboard, an impressive number even on a more expensive board let alone this one. Just to the left of fan header 3 we have the clear CMOS jumper. Down in the bottom corner are the front panel connections. Asus made sure to put labels on the PCB in addition to the installation helpers they included in the box. I would still prefer color labels on the header itself like some other boards have, but I can’t complain too much. Lastly, you get three internal USB 2.0 headers.
Over on the bottom left in the corner we can just barely see the onboard sound for the Z97-A. There are just the four capacitors and the audio chipset, in comparison to the mid to high end motherboards this is extremely tiny, but to keep costs down Asus had to save money somewhere. Moving from left to right along the bottom edge we have the front panel audio connections, a communication port, a built in power switch, and the TPM header. I was surprised to see Asus include a power button considering the other cost cutting measures, but as someone who tests on an open bench the button was very welcomed.
For PCI connections, we get a full mix. You get two legacy PCI slots, two PCI Express x1 slots and three PCI Express x16 length slots. Of the three x16 slots only two run in PCIe 3.0. Those two can run in full x16 speed if running a single card or x8/x8 if you run things in both slots. The third x16 length slot is only PCIe 2.0 and runs in x2 speed at all times so be careful to not use that slot for anything requiring bandwidth like a video card.
Back on the rear I/O panel Asus has changed things around a little. Typically, we would see your USB/PS2 port on the left for your mouse and keyboard. This time around, they put all of the video connections up top and there are plenty of them. You get full sized HDMI and Display Ports, VGA, and DVI. For USB you get two USB 2.0 ports and four USB 3.0 ports. Above the left USB 3.0 ports you get a legacy PS2 port for those of you who still prefer to use their old keyboards and above the other USB 3.0 ports you have an Intel NIC. Lastly, over on the right there is a fairly standard 5 port audio connection array as well as an optical out.
For their cooling design on the Z97-A Asus stepped things up slightly compared to the similarly configured Z87 boards that I tested last year. The cooling design features two black and light cold heatsinks around the CPU socket and the round puck that we saw on the cover of the Z97-A’s box. The chipset cooler is smaller than most other boards so I expect this to be the only area of concern when running the chipset hard, but with this board being a mainstream board and not a gaming or overclocking board this is to be expected.
When we flip the board over we can see the “black” PCB better, but here we can see that the black looks a little different when there are copper traces near the surface giving the board a dark copper look.
