ASUS Z97-A and Z97 Deluxe motherboard review

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Product Showcase Z97-A

Product Showcase Z97-A

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As stated the board has one 8-pin power feed for the processor located just behind the rear IO panel. Made in the form factor ATX (30.5x24.4cm) the Z97 mobo has four slots for DDR3 memory which you can occupy with up to 32GB of DDR3 DRAM DIMMs in a dual-channel configuration.

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Storage connectivity then. SATA ports -- ASUS is equipping the board with four standard SATA3 (6 Gbps) ports. These are linked from the Intel PCH. All ports are SATA 3 thus 6 GBps so you can manage some serious transfer speeds with SSD and HDDs alright. To the right of the SATA ports we see a weird connector though, let's zoom in.

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So yes, to your far right we have the SATA Express connector. It is huge alright. With a proper Sata Express SSD you can obtain very high numbers in performance. The SATA Express interface provides multiple PCI Express lanes and two SATA 3.0 6 Gbit/s ports, exposed through the same connector, allowing use of both PCI Express and SATA storage devices. The technologies utilise PCI Express lanes to achieve maximum transfer speeds of up to 10Gb/s, with ASUS showing its own figures of over 700/800MB per sec in both. We will test this with a Hyper Express SSD prototype from ASUS today in this article. 

 

 

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The Z97-A comes with isolated audio sections, still realtek based. ASUS applies their Crystal Sound 2 solution here. As you can see it also comes with shielding, EMI protection and a layout technique to separate left and right channels to minimize noise and interference. 

 

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Expansion slots include three PCI-e 3.0 x16, two PCI-e 3.0 x1, two PCI slots and an M.2 SSD slot that will enable support for Intel NGFF solid state drives. We will also test this today with the help of a Plextor M2 SSD.

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