It's pretty hard to get me excited about a motherboard by putting a bunch of
flashy lights in my face these days. I haven't even been on the DIY PC scene
that long compared to some folks. But I still feel like at this point I've kind
of seen it all and I've become jaded enough about these often barely
functional features that all I want is a motherboard manufacturer to make a
product that isues all of that nonsense and gives me a back to basics board that
just plain works no matter what you throw at it. I'm starting to get the
feeling that deep down ASUS knows this because in spite of the fact that they
just launched like a dozen Z97 motherboards or something like that,
they offered to send me a grand total of one of them, the Z97WS, or as I'm
calling it, the Lionus edition.
The CMTORM SF17 uses a massive 18 cm fan
to cool your gaming notebook, and it adds a four- port USB hub. Click now to
learn more. The WS in the model number
stands for wonderful stability. And when ASUS does build a board in this series
on a given chipset, they only do one because when you trim the fat and leave
only the good stuff, you only need one model. It's boring looking with no LEDs,
doesn't have any OC panels, carries almost no consumerfriendly features like
onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and lacks some of the really hardcore overclocking
tuning options that you might find on an ROG series board. And yet, it costs the
same as these featureladen, you know, race car type options. So, what the heck
is up with that? Well, the money that would have been spent in R&D on features
that a small fraction of a fraction of the user base will use gets spent on
workstation grade componentry, extremely flexible expansion, and on validating WS
boards with a huge variety of hardware that goes beyond the traditional well,
it works with AMD graphics cards and NVIDIA graphics cards, so I guess it's
okay treatment that many motherboards get. We're talking RAID cards, high-end
nick cards, PCIe storage cards, and even much more obscure stuff than that. All
right, so what comes with it? You get an IO shield, a USB 2/Wire PCI bracket, a
serial PCI bracket, eight SATA 36 GB per
second cables, two-way, 3-way, and four-way SLI bridges, those Q connector
blocks that make it easier to plug in your front switches, a manual, a driver
disc, and finally the motherboard itself. Now, I said already it's boring
looking, but I guess now you guys see my point. I prefer the full-on borggasm
look with a black PCB and just plain silver accents. But I guess if I had to
have a gold motherboard, I'll take a practical looking one like this over a
blingy tacky one like some of the ones I've seen in the past. Our feature tour
begins at the CPU socket where we'll find support for current generation LGA1
1150 Haswell and Haswell refresh processors with promises of future
Broadwell support. a nice little thing to have in your pocket. Those CPUs all
share a common memory support scheme. So to the right of the socket, you'll find four DDR3 memory slots that run in dual
channel mode. Power to the CPU and RAM is handled by a next generation all
digital power design with eight phases for the CPU and two for the memory. And
it includes some pretty seriously impressive Japanese capacitors that are
rated at an industryleading 12,000 hours
of operation at 150° C. Well higher than
any PC should get. On the top edge, we find hardware buttons for TPU and EPU
optimizations. I generally don't touch them, but if you want to, then TPU
boosts CPU performance a bit, and EPU reduces power consumption a little bit.
Next to those switches, we've got a couple more useful switches. The memo K
button boots the PC with super safe memory settings. So, even with finicky
RAM, you can get into the BIOS and make the adjustments you need to. And the XMP
switch lets you enable performance optimized memory profiles without any
software configuration. This could be handy since the board does support
memory speeds up to 3,300 MHz out of the
box. Moving down the right hand side is the 24 pin connector that aside from
being in the correct position on the right hand edge, ASUS claims is
exceptional because it uses a new design that improves contact with your power
supply connector, reducing the risk of burning out the contacts. Neato under
that are two USB3 front headers for a total of 10 USB 3 ports on the board.
And then the doctor power switch that enables OS monitoring of your power
supply to help you detect a failing unit. Haven't got a dead power supply
that I feel like plugging into a working board to test it, but I guess that sounds pretty cool. Continuing on down,
we've got either eight SATA 36 GB per second ports with six of them coming off
of an Intel chipset and two off of a secondary as media one or four Intel
SATA 3 ports and two SATA Express 10
Gbit per second ports. one powered off the Intel chipset and one off the Asdia
chipset. This will provide a ton of expansion options as SATA Express drives
start showing up, but it also doesn't end there. There's an M2 slot right next
to them for a total of three SSDs that can be plugged right into PCI Express
rather than just SATA for improved throughput and latency. Right on. Above
the usual contingent of audio, FireWire, serial, USB 2, TPM, and front panel
connector headers are the only necessary onboard buttons that you might find
useful for testbench use, like power, reset, and clear SIMOS. No, you know,
fancy esoteric functionality there. You'll also find a fourdigit post
readout that will give you useful diagnostic information. But if you can't
see it because, you know, the numbers move too fast or because there's a
graphics card in the way of the board and you, you know, you can't see it,
don't worry. You can dump the logs onto a USB drive using the Q code logger
button right next to the USB BIOS flashback button on the rear panel that
lets you flash the BIOS without a CPU installed. Wicked expansion is another
pillar of WS boards. And with four PCI Express Gen 3 16X slots that can
simultaneously operate an 8X mode, this iteration doesn't disappoint. That means
you can throw four AMD or NVIDIA graphics cards in here in SLI or
Crossfire for gaming. Or you can simply load it up with a bunch of compute cards
for workstation use. You can also fill it up with red rockets, raid cards, or
whatever else you want to do because boards like this are made for future
growth. Love it. Just make sure that you
use that six pin auxiliary connector above the top slot if you want to load
her up, so to speak. Even the fancy 24 pin connector likely won't save the
board from quad overclocked R9290X's
if you don't use that auxiliary connector. Finishing up in the corner,
we find a quality, if unexceptional, onboard audio solution that uses the
Realtech ALC 1150 codec. I use a separate amplifier anyway. So, this is
more than good enough for my needs. But, if you're expecting your motherboard to
drive fancy 300 to 600 ohm impedance headphones, you may want to rethink
something about your setup. On the back of the board, we find some good stuff.
And actually, my first complaint about it. I'll start with the good stuff. two
USB 2 ports, six USB 3 ports, dual Intel gigabit LAN, 7.1 analog audio out with
goldplated connectors, e SATA 6 Gbit per second, optical audio out, a display
port output, and an HDMI port. Now, the
glaring emission in what is otherwise a
perfect workstation grade board, that mini DisplayPort connector. While it
does enable three concurrent displays, it really should, in my mind, be a
Thunderbolt 2 port on a board of this caliber. ASUS does have their
Thunderbolt header to allow this functionality to be added with an add-in
card, but I still wish it was on board and they weren't asking me to spend more
money and waste a waste a PCIe slot on it after the fact. Well, that was it.
That was my only complaint. Aside from the stuff I just mentioned, you've got the usual ASUS essentials, including
their easy to navigate UFI BIOS, onboard temperature probes, their automagical
fan speed tuning that can create fan speed profiles with the six onboard
three or four pin fan headers that damically adapt to your system load. And
finally, due to its build quality and BIOS optimization, this WS board has
enough overclocking options to run with the best of them. So, it's all basically
there. But that's not the focus here, and you won't find marketing blurs about
that on the box or on the product page. No. While, as usual, ASUS's messaging is
a little rough when they try to emphasize their quality control
standards and compatibility testing, the message still gets through. And based on
my experience with their WS-class boards, I can't recommend anything more
heartily. I still like some flashy lights on my fans and water cooling
tubing or whatever. But when it comes to the motherboard, an often overlooked
component that does so little for performance these days, but so much for
smooth operation, I'll take a WS board any day of the week if I could choose
any board on the market, which I can, so I did. Thank you for watching my
overview of the Z97WS. Just like with all of my videos, you can find a link
with pricing and availability that includes my affiliate code in the video description under the like, share, and
dislike buttons, which I'd love for you to use accordingly. Also, in the video
description is a support link where you can give us a monthly contribution, buy
a t-shirt like this one, or change your Amazon bookmarks to ones that include
our affiliate code, so we get a small kickback whenever you buy lozenes or
whatever. Thank you for watching, guys. I hope you enjoyed this video as much as
we enjoyed making it. And don't forget to mash that subscribe button if you
haven't already. By the way, that bit at the beginning about how WS stands for
wonderfully stable or whatever I said stands for workstation. I was just
messing with you. Well,