motherboards

Seven Intel 9-series boards put through their paces.

Z97-A

$145 Asus

Yes, it’s an Asus at the top of another motherboard roundup. The Taiwanese manufacturer has a knack for making highperformance, feature-rich motherboards that tick all the boxes for gamers. This 9-series board also manages to hit the value button: it’s one of the most impressive Z97 boards in this test, but also one of the most affordable.

Considering its lengthy specs list that might come as a surprise. In keeping with the Z97 chipset’s abilities this board comes with the new M.2 PCIe storage connection, and you’ll also find a SATA Express port nestled among the traditional SATA connections. There’s the full complement of display outputs, but gamers will be more interested to know that the Z97-A is also licensed for both AMD’s CrossFireX and Nvidia’s SLI multi-GPU tech.

Where Asus’s Republic of Gamers range represents the dedicated enthusiast gamer, this Z97-A is more of a generic board. But it’s not a case of jack of all trades, master of none. Somewhat surprisingly, the Z97-A is the best overclocking board in this test.

Where it does look a touch disappointing is in its storage performance. The sequential read speed is average, the write speed at the bottom of the pile. However, the

Surprisingly, the Z97-A is the best overclocking board in this test

4K random read/write speeds are right up there with the rest, and these are a better indication of the general responsiveness of a machine than the sequential numbers.

The gaming performance is decent too. It’s not the fastest, but it shows no real weakness either.

What you don’t get among its enthusiast-class offerings are voltage checkpoints, LED debug display or board-mounted power and reset switches. Those are only of limited

interest to most people anyway, and of use mostly when you’re running a motherboard on a test bench. You do get Asus’s excellent BIOS setup. It’s the best offered by any board manufacturer and makes tweaking your system a breeze thanks to the powerful and info-rich layout. You also get fully-shielded onboard audio, so the Crystal Sound 2 audio chip and connections are free of electrical interference.

The Z97-A may not be the most striking-looking of the boards here, or even the outright fastest, but if you want a serious feature-set without a severe pricetag, this is my pick of the current 9-series motherboards I’ve tested.