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www.coolermaster-usa.com. Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS Z87
Deluxe. This is from their channel series of boards where you find models
like Pro and Evo and Deluxe and all those kinds of things traditionally. And
they have done a lot of things differently with this generation of
product on the LG 1150 platform. So, these support the latest fourth
generation Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, code named Haswell. You've
got full support for NVIDIA SLI, AMD Crossfire, as well as DTS audio. So,
that's a license that they definitely did have to pay for. I'm also going to
talk a fair bit about the four-way optimizations enabled by their dual
intelligent processors generation 4 technology. On the rest of the outside
of the box, you know what? We're not going to worry too much about that. Let's get this thing opened up. So, the
first thing we see once we get her open is the motherboard itself. And ASUS has
gone with a serious departure from their
traditional color scheme on these boards, which has been black and blue
for quite some time. Now, we have a
black and yellow and gold color scheme that looks quite striking. So, without
further ado, let's put that away. Next,
we're going to get into more ado, which is all this other stuff in here. So,
we've got an IO shield, Q connectors for easily
connecting your front panel connectors, a soft flexible SLI
bridge. This is interesting. So, you
guys are you guys are going to like this. This is a wireless AC dualband
antenna. And I've actually seen a live demo of this running at in excess of 850
megabit per second, which is very, very
cool. six SATA 3 6 Gbit per second
cables uh including three right angle and three straight cables as well as a
user guide with D driver disc which you
probably won't need because you're going to download the latest from the ASUS website. Round out the accessory
package. So not as rich as what you might find on something like an ROG
board, but I think that really is expected given that this is a lower tier
of product. So I want to clarify something
right from the start. This is a channel board. that this is not necessarily a
gaming oriented board, but that I mean it's going to be an ROG board for that,
but you're still going to find great performance in gaming, great performance
and overclocking and all that stuff, but it means that the features, particularly
what ASUS is talking about with these boards, are more focused on other things
and that starts right with the power. So, you've got your eight pin CPU power
connector up here at the top left in its ideal location. And you've got a nice
beefy heat sink arrangement with a heat pipe on the chipset as well as the power
delivery system, which is quite beefy as well. Next up, you're going to find this
little guy right here. This is an EPU chip, and this is where their dual
intelligent processors for really come into play. So, it allows you to do a
number of really cool things through the software. You can control things like
fan speed. You can control how much power your system is consuming. You can
even set a TDP target. So, you can set a power consumption target for your CPU.
Set it and forget it, and the EPU will automatically go, "Okay, yep, we'll make
sure that CPU never goes over that power consumption." So, you can make your
system more efficient. You can do a number of other cool things with this,
including turning off or on certain USB
ports when the system's powered off. Remember, guys, onoff charging has been
a feature on motherboards for a couple generations now. But what if you didn't
want all the ports powered on while the system isn't turned on? What if you had
things like LED lighting as an underglow effect under your case and you wanted it
to turn off when your system's not on? Well, now you can actually selectively
do that, which is really, really cool. The EPU also allows you to control or
well, the EPU combined with the TPU also allows you to control performance
profiles with the TPU giving you two different tiers of of overclocked
performance. one of which is more like a more aggressive turbo boost and the
second of which enables XMPP and starts overclocking all of the cores
concurrently. All of this is enabled by ASUS's fully digital power delivery
system as well as some of the other cool things they're doing like building in
only four pin fan connectors which is
really neat because it allows you to take full control of these fans which
can also be configured as part of that whole system control. So you can control
performance, power consumption, as well as cooling. And not only that, but it
has a special away mode that's going to be able to reduce your CPU power
consumption and detect when you're not at the computer so that it doesn't take
as much power. But what it does do is allows you to still do passive things
like download or access files remotely and all that kind of cool stuff. So,
speaking of four pin fan connectors, there's a special CPU fan connector
that's built into their new generation of boards that automatically detects
whether you have a three pin or a four pin fan connected so that it can use
either analog or PWM control for your CPU fan. You've got full support for
four DIMs of DDR3 running in dual channel and higher memory speeds are
supported. The board supports natively up to DDR3
2800 megahertz, which is incredibly cool. the 24 pin connectors in its ideal
location along the right hand edge of the board. And I like to see this more
four pins over on the right hand edge of the board. So many boards hide all of
their fan connectors like back here. And I'm sitting here going, "Well, who has
all of their fans on the back of their case?" Nobody. There's usually like one
there. Uh whereas you often will have a couple fans on the front of the case and
these can reach them easily. Your front USB3 connectors in its ideal location
along the right hand edge. And you've got 10 SATA 36 Gbit per second
connectors, six of which are powered by the Intel chipset. You've got hardware
buttons built in for your TPU and EPU modes. So that's for your energy
efficient processor, the EPU, and your TPU, which has one and two. So it's
actually got three positions. So TPU off, TPU 1, TPU 2. So those are those
multiple profiles I talked about before. You've got your USB 2 front panel
connectors, two LED post readouts, so
the potential here is endless. There's all kinds of four-letter words I
wouldn't mind putting on my motherboard if given the opportunity, as well as a
clear SIMOS button, allowing you to well clear the SIMOS. You've got built-in
power and reset boards which uh belong on a high-end board but are not
necessarily, you know, colored cool like
on the ROG board and located in a more prominent location because fewer people
are going to be using this in an outofcase sort of environment. Seven
expansion slots total with four PCIe 1X slots and three PCIe 16X slots. However,
it should be noted that two of them are going to run in either 16x or 8x8x and
one of them runs in 4X. So, this board supports two-way SLI or up to three-way
Crossfire with a potentially a performance hit because that four third
card is only going to run at PCIe 4X.
Now, this brings me to one of the things that I think is coolest about this
board. So, this Wi-Fi go right here, it
has built-in wireless AC, and I just
think that is really, really cool, especially with some of the software
things that ASUS has done. So, they allow you to use your computer as a
Wi-Fi hotspot. They allow you to easily take remote control of your computer.
And they allow you to use the software as a DNA server. And it enables easy
file transfer. So, this is all cool stuff that is important to your your
mainstream or your channel customer. Also, on the back of the board, we find
that someone uh put these stickers on
the wrong spots. These stickers are supposed to be up here. Give me a moment. and we're ready to have a look
at the rear IO. So, we've got a multitude of display outputs, including
mini DisplayPort, full-size DisplayPort, and HDMI. So, we've moved away
completely from DVI and VGA. And remember, guys, what's cool about
Haswell chips is they do support multi-dis outputs, meaning that from a
productivity standpoint, so sure, you're not going to be gaming on a surround
setup, but from a productivity standpoint, that's really, really cool.
We've got six USB 3.0 0 ports with full
support on the as media controller for UASP which does improve USB3 performance
with supported devices. We've got an optical audio out, a USB BIOS flashback
button, and I have used this and it does work. If you brick your board, you can
use this to reset it as long as you follow the instructions uh that you find
online. We've got four USB 2.0 ports.
And I think the point of this was to say, "Hey, plug your keyboard and mouse in here." because some USB 3 ports still
have some compatibility weirdness with some keyboards and mice. There's nothing
ASUS can do about it. It's not really their fault. I think it's going to be a long time before we see any motherboards
with no USB 2 or at least it'll be a long time before we should. We've got an
Intel gigabit network controller as well as a different one. Use this one because
it supports ASUS's eye control software which allows you to set network
prioritization and cool stuff like that within AI suite. And last but not least,
we've got 7.1 audio out. Now, a lot of
the improvements that ASUS has made go beyond the hardware, such as in the UEFI
BIOS. And I call it the UFI BIOS, even though I know that's not correct. It's
called the UEFI. So, they've got a bunch of really cool stuff, including ways
that you can uh segment away sort of
your most frequently used settings. They've got the simple mode much
expanded, so it includes some of the more frequently used things where people
were just not even bothering to use it because it didn't allow you to do the
things you needed to do. They've got full control of every fan in the system
now, which is very, very cool. And they actually ran a demo for us showing how
quickly the system can actually set itself up to do things like figure out
the RPMs of all your fans, u figure out the cooling that it all needs, and it'll
just selfoptimize itself, which is very, very neat. You can also make notes
within the BIOS, which is cool. Now, I've always liked features like BIOS
profiles because they allow you to kind of, you know, say, "Oh, well, this is my
aggressive overclock. this is my safe one that I know works if that one bugs
out or whatever else. But you could never really label them. All I could do was put like 4 GHz stable and that was
all I could really do. Now you can make notes within the BIOS and it even keeps
a log of the last thing you changed. So when you're tweaking and overclocking,
you can be like, "Oh, well it was working before and now it's not. What did I actually change?" And you can go
back and fix it quite easily. The main information is pinned to the bottom. And
from the demos that I've seen, I haven't actually fired one of these up for
myself yet. It looks much more efficient to navigate, which is really saying
something because it was already quite strong. Thank you for checking out my
unboxing and first look at the Z87 Deluxe from ASUS. Don't forget to
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