ASUS Z87-Deluxe Motherboard Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,217 words · ~11 min read
0:00
This video is brought to you by Cooler Master featuring the Siden 240mm
0:04
all-in-one CPU water cooling system. Check it out at
0:09
www.coolermaster-usa.com. Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS Z87
0:14
Deluxe. This is from their channel series of boards where you find models
0:19
like Pro and Evo and Deluxe and all those kinds of things traditionally. And
0:23
they have done a lot of things differently with this generation of
0:26
product on the LG 1150 platform. So, these support the latest fourth
0:30
generation Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, code named Haswell. You've
0:35
got full support for NVIDIA SLI, AMD Crossfire, as well as DTS audio. So,
0:39
that's a license that they definitely did have to pay for. I'm also going to
0:42
talk a fair bit about the four-way optimizations enabled by their dual
0:46
intelligent processors generation 4 technology. On the rest of the outside
0:51
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
0:57
first thing we see once we get her open is the motherboard itself. And ASUS has
1:02
gone with a serious departure from their
1:05
traditional color scheme on these boards, which has been black and blue
1:09
for quite some time. Now, we have a
1:12
black and yellow and gold color scheme that looks quite striking. So, without
1:18
further ado, let's put that away. Next,
1:21
we're going to get into more ado, which is all this other stuff in here. So,
1:26
we've got an IO shield, Q connectors for easily
1:30
connecting your front panel connectors, a soft flexible SLI
1:35
bridge. This is interesting. So, you
1:38
guys are you guys are going to like this. This is a wireless AC dualband
1:44
antenna. And I've actually seen a live demo of this running at in excess of 850
1:50
megabit per second, which is very, very
1:53
cool. six SATA 3 6 Gbit per second
1:56
cables uh including three right angle and three straight cables as well as a
2:00
user guide with D driver disc which you
2:04
probably won't need because you're going to download the latest from the ASUS website. Round out the accessory
2:09
package. So not as rich as what you might find on something like an ROG
2:12
board, but I think that really is expected given that this is a lower tier
2:17
of product. So I want to clarify something
2:20
right from the start. This is a channel board. that this is not necessarily a
2:24
gaming oriented board, but that I mean it's going to be an ROG board for that,
2:29
but you're still going to find great performance in gaming, great performance
2:32
and overclocking and all that stuff, but it means that the features, particularly
2:36
what ASUS is talking about with these boards, are more focused on other things
2:40
and that starts right with the power. So, you've got your eight pin CPU power
2:44
connector up here at the top left in its ideal location. And you've got a nice
2:49
beefy heat sink arrangement with a heat pipe on the chipset as well as the power
2:54
delivery system, which is quite beefy as well. Next up, you're going to find this
2:58
little guy right here. This is an EPU chip, and this is where their dual
3:02
intelligent processors for really come into play. So, it allows you to do a
3:06
number of really cool things through the software. You can control things like
3:10
fan speed. You can control how much power your system is consuming. You can
3:13
even set a TDP target. So, you can set a power consumption target for your CPU.
3:19
Set it and forget it, and the EPU will automatically go, "Okay, yep, we'll make
3:22
sure that CPU never goes over that power consumption." So, you can make your
3:25
system more efficient. You can do a number of other cool things with this,
3:29
including turning off or on certain USB
3:32
ports when the system's powered off. Remember, guys, onoff charging has been
3:36
a feature on motherboards for a couple generations now. But what if you didn't
3:39
want all the ports powered on while the system isn't turned on? What if you had
3:43
things like LED lighting as an underglow effect under your case and you wanted it
3:46
to turn off when your system's not on? Well, now you can actually selectively
3:50
do that, which is really, really cool. The EPU also allows you to control or
3:54
well, the EPU combined with the TPU also allows you to control performance
3:58
profiles with the TPU giving you two different tiers of of overclocked
4:02
performance. one of which is more like a more aggressive turbo boost and the
4:06
second of which enables XMPP and starts overclocking all of the cores
4:11
concurrently. All of this is enabled by ASUS's fully digital power delivery
4:15
system as well as some of the other cool things they're doing like building in
4:19
only four pin fan connectors which is
4:22
really neat because it allows you to take full control of these fans which
4:26
can also be configured as part of that whole system control. So you can control
4:30
performance, power consumption, as well as cooling. And not only that, but it
4:35
has a special away mode that's going to be able to reduce your CPU power
4:39
consumption and detect when you're not at the computer so that it doesn't take
4:42
as much power. But what it does do is allows you to still do passive things
4:46
like download or access files remotely and all that kind of cool stuff. So,
4:50
speaking of four pin fan connectors, there's a special CPU fan connector
4:53
that's built into their new generation of boards that automatically detects
4:56
whether you have a three pin or a four pin fan connected so that it can use
4:59
either analog or PWM control for your CPU fan. You've got full support for
5:04
four DIMs of DDR3 running in dual channel and higher memory speeds are
5:10
supported. The board supports natively up to DDR3
5:14
2800 megahertz, which is incredibly cool. the 24 pin connectors in its ideal
5:19
location along the right hand edge of the board. And I like to see this more
5:23
four pins over on the right hand edge of the board. So many boards hide all of
5:26
their fan connectors like back here. And I'm sitting here going, "Well, who has
5:30
all of their fans on the back of their case?" Nobody. There's usually like one
5:33
there. Uh whereas you often will have a couple fans on the front of the case and
5:37
these can reach them easily. Your front USB3 connectors in its ideal location
5:41
along the right hand edge. And you've got 10 SATA 36 Gbit per second
5:46
connectors, six of which are powered by the Intel chipset. You've got hardware
5:51
buttons built in for your TPU and EPU modes. So that's for your energy
5:55
efficient processor, the EPU, and your TPU, which has one and two. So it's
6:01
actually got three positions. So TPU off, TPU 1, TPU 2. So those are those
6:05
multiple profiles I talked about before. You've got your USB 2 front panel
6:10
connectors, two LED post readouts, so
6:13
the potential here is endless. There's all kinds of four-letter words I
6:16
wouldn't mind putting on my motherboard if given the opportunity, as well as a
6:19
clear SIMOS button, allowing you to well clear the SIMOS. You've got built-in
6:23
power and reset boards which uh belong on a high-end board but are not
6:27
necessarily, you know, colored cool like
6:30
on the ROG board and located in a more prominent location because fewer people
6:34
are going to be using this in an outofcase sort of environment. Seven
6:38
expansion slots total with four PCIe 1X slots and three PCIe 16X slots. However,
6:44
it should be noted that two of them are going to run in either 16x or 8x8x and
6:49
one of them runs in 4X. So, this board supports two-way SLI or up to three-way
6:54
Crossfire with a potentially a performance hit because that four third
6:59
card is only going to run at PCIe 4X.
7:03
Now, this brings me to one of the things that I think is coolest about this
7:06
board. So, this Wi-Fi go right here, it
7:09
has built-in wireless AC, and I just
7:13
think that is really, really cool, especially with some of the software
7:16
things that ASUS has done. So, they allow you to use your computer as a
7:21
Wi-Fi hotspot. They allow you to easily take remote control of your computer.
7:26
And they allow you to use the software as a DNA server. And it enables easy
7:31
file transfer. So, this is all cool stuff that is important to your your
7:35
mainstream or your channel customer. Also, on the back of the board, we find
7:39
that someone uh put these stickers on
7:43
the wrong spots. These stickers are supposed to be up here. Give me a moment. and we're ready to have a look
7:48
at the rear IO. So, we've got a multitude of display outputs, including
7:53
mini DisplayPort, full-size DisplayPort, and HDMI. So, we've moved away
7:57
completely from DVI and VGA. And remember, guys, what's cool about
8:01
Haswell chips is they do support multi-dis outputs, meaning that from a
8:05
productivity standpoint, so sure, you're not going to be gaming on a surround
8:08
setup, but from a productivity standpoint, that's really, really cool.
8:11
We've got six USB 3.0 0 ports with full
8:15
support on the as media controller for UASP which does improve USB3 performance
8:19
with supported devices. We've got an optical audio out, a USB BIOS flashback
8:25
button, and I have used this and it does work. If you brick your board, you can
8:28
use this to reset it as long as you follow the instructions uh that you find
8:32
online. We've got four USB 2.0 ports.
8:36
And I think the point of this was to say, "Hey, plug your keyboard and mouse in here." because some USB 3 ports still
8:42
have some compatibility weirdness with some keyboards and mice. There's nothing
8:45
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
8:50
with no USB 2 or at least it'll be a long time before we should. We've got an
8:54
Intel gigabit network controller as well as a different one. Use this one because
8:59
it supports ASUS's eye control software which allows you to set network
9:02
prioritization and cool stuff like that within AI suite. And last but not least,
9:06
we've got 7.1 audio out. Now, a lot of
9:09
the improvements that ASUS has made go beyond the hardware, such as in the UEFI
9:13
BIOS. And I call it the UFI BIOS, even though I know that's not correct. It's
9:16
called the UEFI. So, they've got a bunch of really cool stuff, including ways
9:20
that you can uh segment away sort of
9:23
your most frequently used settings. They've got the simple mode much
9:28
expanded, so it includes some of the more frequently used things where people
9:31
were just not even bothering to use it because it didn't allow you to do the
9:35
things you needed to do. They've got full control of every fan in the system
9:39
now, which is very, very cool. And they actually ran a demo for us showing how
9:43
quickly the system can actually set itself up to do things like figure out
9:47
the RPMs of all your fans, u figure out the cooling that it all needs, and it'll
9:52
just selfoptimize itself, which is very, very neat. You can also make notes
9:56
within the BIOS, which is cool. Now, I've always liked features like BIOS
10:00
profiles because they allow you to kind of, you know, say, "Oh, well, this is my
10:04
aggressive overclock. this is my safe one that I know works if that one bugs
10:08
out or whatever else. But you could never really label them. All I could do was put like 4 GHz stable and that was
10:13
all I could really do. Now you can make notes within the BIOS and it even keeps
10:17
a log of the last thing you changed. So when you're tweaking and overclocking,
10:21
you can be like, "Oh, well it was working before and now it's not. What did I actually change?" And you can go
10:26
back and fix it quite easily. The main information is pinned to the bottom. And
10:30
from the demos that I've seen, I haven't actually fired one of these up for
10:33
myself yet. It looks much more efficient to navigate, which is really saying
10:37
something because it was already quite strong. Thank you for checking out my
10:41
unboxing and first look at the Z87 Deluxe from ASUS. Don't forget to
10:44
subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.