With the launch of Intel’s Haswell there was the normal shift to a new chipset. This is Intel’s Z87 chipset and everyone rushed to get their version of this new chipset out onto the market. Many of the boards that reached consumers were just rehashes of boards that were already on the market with the Z77 chipset, but with the bonus of improved performance under Haswell. So with that in mind we have Asus’ Z87-Expert up on the test bench to see just how it stacks up to the older Z77 boards running Ivy Bridge. Let’s dive in.
Conclusion – Asus makes a good board (although they sometimes over engineer them) and they have been working to choose quality components for their boards. We can see this clearly in the Z87-Expert board. The Nichicon caps, improved tracing, clean layout and solid feature set. Sadly they went with gold and black for their color scheme, but that should not take away from the performance of the board. So far all we have a design and component choices to go by, but things look very good with just those in hand. Looks aside, we will be diving into the performance side of our review in part II.
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