So now that we have covered the design and features of the Asus Z87-Expert it is time to dive into how well the board performs. Asus has always been a company that talks up the performance that their products are capable of and, from our initial look, we can understand this. Asus is one of the companies that drives the market in terms of how to build a motherboard and the components used to squeeze as much performance as possible out of them. So with that in mind let’s just how well the Z87-Expert does perform when on the bench.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The Asus Z87-Expert sells for $230 new on most online stores. It is not out of line with other boards with the number of features built in. You get WiFi, Bluetooth, Intel LAN, and many other of Asus’ stock features. You would think that the $230 is a fair price, but the market does not seem to completely agree (even with thunderbolt). We have seen them for around $100 on sites like Amazon and eBay. We are not sure why the disparity in prices between the new retail board and the ones that appear to be “used” unless the market is simply not ready to pay that much to make the incremental move to Haswell.Conclusion -Overall I like the Asus Z87-Expert, but there are a few things that I would like to see Asus improve on. I would love to see Asus finally drop in improved audio on their mid-range and entry level boards. This would be a very nice improvement as even the most entry level system needs to be able to handle multi-media playback. The WiFi Go Package, while a nice option does not truly have that many real world uses. When we asked people about the options they were not all that excited, most agreed that having a built in WiFi card complete with Bluetooth was a nice option but the other software was lost on them. Getting into the whole software side of things we would like to see Asus clean up their installers. While most people building a system will know to do a custom install to only get the drivers and utilities they want the extra are annoying and not needed. Asus needs to return to making solid board and drop some of the gimmicks that they have been pushing lately. If they had done this with the Z87-Expert they might have been able to offer it at a lower price which would certainly make it more attractive to the consumers. In the end the Asus Z87-Expert has some good points, but it is a tad overprices for the level of performance you get and that is not something the feature set can really overcome.Tell us what you think in our Forum
