ECS Z97I-Drone motherboard review - Introduction

Meet the small one, the ECS Z97I-Drone motherboard

Small, smaller aaaaand stop .. 17 CM ! Tagged in their L337 Gaming series, ECS released the Z97I Drone motherboard. It offers decent features at a very good price. ECS took the Z97 chipset and made a nice dark looking motherboard. It also comes with a custom audio solution. Join us in the Z97I Drone review, a product that will please the budget PC gamer with the hunger for a high-end PC at an incredibly small form factor.

Intel released their series 9 chipsets, among them will be low-end and high-end desktop solutions. For the consumers and readers of Guru3D, H97 and Z97 should be the two most interesting ones. For the HTPC end of things H97 is the most appealing as tweaking options are stripped away with a lower price-tag. For the more hardcore gamers and PC aficionados, the Z97 is the most interesting. Z97 by itself as a chipset is nothing special. HOWEVER, we have plenty to look at as the motherboard manufacturers went totally nuts and started redesigning their motherboards, added new features and made them extraordinarily cool. You'll spot new redesigns build on the DNA of Z87 yet improved massively. Cool looks, features like AC WIFI, M2 SSDs and Sata Express will bring some very interesting features onto the market. So if (at the time) you didn't upgrade to Z87, now might be a good time. 

Now back to ECS, the machine series really is supposed to be the mainstream model but I'd tag this in the somewhat high-end class alright, you can fit even Devils Canyon processor on it (Core i7 4970K). This Intel Z97 based motherboard will come with nice PC options like 8-pin EPS connectors, a 4+1-phase VRM design for the processor, a full PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x16 with one card).

The board comes with an Intel I218-V Gigabit Fast Ethernet Controller. Storage wise you will get five SATA 6 Gb/s and a mini M.2 slot intended for a WIFI module. All-in-all this motherboard offers a decent feature set for this small form factor, so join me in a review and overview of what ECS has to offer with the ECS Z97I-Drone motherboard, next page please.