- Date:
- Monday , April 28, 2014
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:

ASUS Z97 Deluxe LGA 1150 Motherboard Review
Today ASUS is launching its Z97 series DELUXE motherboard based on Intel’s new Z97 Express chipset. Intel's Z97 chipset is little more than a refresh of the Z87 Express chipset. Despite this, the Z97-Deluxe we are reviewing today builds on ASUS’ lengthy tradition of innovation and attempts to set the bar even higher than before.
Overclocking
Overclocking the ASUS Z97 Deluxe was a strange experience. I started off with the 5-Way optimization in AI Suite III. When you start the process you can select the advanced settings and go through the testing parameters which I set to use maximum CPU power, all cores, no target temperatures or clocks, 15 second stability and achieved a result of 4.5GHz/1800MHz DDR3 RAM effortlessly.
4.50GHz (100x45) DDR3 1800MHz
You can see the stress testing window and the report once done. There is a countdown screen that appears before the report though it has no abort so I’m not sure why it does that.
4.60GHz (100x45) DDR3 1866MHz
In manual mode things were quite different. On a Z87 motherboard using this CPU I need about 1.285v max to get a 4.7GHz overclock out of the system. I typically need to adjust power phase settings or load-line calibration to near maximum but not always. With the Z97 Deluxe I found out very quickly that 1.285v was not going to work. Instead I needed to use 1.365v or higher to achieve any kind of stability past 4.5GHz. Here is the interesting part, the system actually ran the CPU cooler than it would on a Z87 motherboard. On a Z87 motherboard that type of voltage setting would have me hitting the wall for thermal throttling quickly. I’d be looking at 90c+ temperatures with those settings. On Z97 I had sub-80c temperatures.
What’s even more interesting about this is that 4.5GHz using the auto-tuning feature achieved that result at 1.28v which is what would normally get me to 4.7GHz on most systems. On this one 4.7GHz eluded me. I know this CPU can do it but either BIOS maturity or voltage design is holding me back. If it’s the latter it’s because I suspect this is designed more for Haswell’s successor in mind than current Haswell CPUs. For now the best I could achieve is 4.6GHz/DDR3 1866MHz at 1.38v. And again it was fairly boring as all I did was play with one setting and that’s the CPU voltage.
Overclocking will either get extremely boring or extremely interesting depending on how you look at it. From the look of things right now the CPU lotto will determine more about your overclock than anything else. At least with regard to ASUS motherboards.
Conclusions
NFC Express 2 and Wireless Charging
There were two features I didn’t get to do much with nor even talk about at this point. Those are NFC Express 2 and the wireless charger. It isn’t as if those were overlooked but we were under some fairly tight time constraints with this one and frankly sometimes you have to pick and choose what you’ll focus on. Those two features are cool and deserve some attention but these are somewhat outside our usual focus.
The wireless charging feature is cool. That’s even something I wouldn’t mind taking advantage of as it would enable me to just set my phone down on my desk without connecting a cable to it. That’s absolutely something I’d love to do. As for NFC Express 2, things are a bit more confusing. That feature enables all kinds of cloud functionality, tablet and smart phone synchronization, monitoring and control. ASUS has had these features for some time but made improvements this generation.
Among the biggest changes is the ability to receive alerts on your smart phone or tablet. As of yet you cannot respond to those alerts and decide whether or not an alert is worth a response or something you can ignore. A single chassis fan going down with your thermals otherwise in good shape is something you could potentially ignore until you got around to fixing it while something like your CPU temperature skyrocketing or your CPU fan header reporting 0 RPM on a water pump would be more "oh crap" worthy. I’ve pointed out to ASUS that being able to choose an action in response to such alerts would be crucial in truly making this functionality useful to the enthusiast.
One other thing you can now do is transfer a video from your monitor to say your tablet and watch it while you walk around your house chasing after children or pets that are misbehaving. Whatever the reason for it you can do it almost seamlessly and that’s a good thing. You can now choose whether or not to keep the audio outputting to devices on your PC even while you watch the video on your tablet. If you’ve got a surround system that’s nice and still audible as you walk around that might be nice.
Dan's Thoughts:
My experiences with the ASUS Z97 Deluxe weren't without issue, but in retrospect most of the issues weren’t really ASUS’ fault. For example I couldn’t make our Thunderbolt enclosure work with the ThunderboltEX II included. The issue with Thunderbolt was due to the pre-production firmware on our existing enclosure. Again this isn’t something that you can blame ASUS for. The UASP function is simply not supported in Windows 7 per ASUS. So that’s an issue specific to how we are testing right now. This used to work in Windows 7 and I have no idea why the change was made, so I can sort of split the blame there between our testing on Windows 7 and ASUS dropping that feature for Windows 7.
The only issue I had which could be something specific to ASUS was the USB 3.0 boost feature which prompted me to reinstall it when I tried to use Turbo mode on the Intel ports. I reinstalled it from the disc and the problem went away. I have no idea why this occurred so I can’t say if it was something I did wrong, or some setting in the UEFI which caused this or not. And again in the proper perspective those issues weren’t deal breakers. The out of box experience was overall excellent and the included bundle was impressive. I had no trouble installing the software and drivers through the ASUS automated installer and setting up the system. I’m especially impressed by this given just how far ASUS has advanced this generation.
As I look back on the Z97 Deluxe experience I have to say I’m very much impressed with the improvements I’ve seen. While I’m not overwhelmed by the chipset itself the improvements ASUS made specifically are definitely excitement worthy. The UEFI’s improvements are all outstanding. I especially like the tighter RAID Option ROM integration and getting rid of the old Ctrl+I routine and manually creating an array through a DOS like menu system. You could avoid that before but not on a boot volume. The audio design was particularly interesting as we saw it on ROG first and now it’s been brought down to the regular channel motherboards. That’s absolutely fantastic.
The AI Suite III only got a minor facelift on the surface but the improvements are the right kind. These extend user control and help in a very tangible way by giving the user more granular control over that auto-tuning process. Some of the testing done in the application was present in the last generation albeit behind the scenes. ASUS has now brought that testing into the light where the user can see what’s going on at any given point and that attention to detail and customer feedback is refreshing. Now you can get overclocks which would normally be more indicative of a seasoned system tuner with almost none of the effort. If you don’t use it that’s free performance you are leaving on the table.
You can’t say ASUS doesn’t listen to its customers as features like the improved 5-Way optimization process are almost always a direct result of that feedback. It was also nice to see ASUS ditch the corn colored plastics and doing the black and gold color scheme the right way. That’s another product of ASUS taking feedback to heart. The medallion style heat sink is certainly eye catching and differentiates the ASUS motherboards from similarly themed motherboards like some of those put out by ASRock. Other features such as the hardware based XMP switch were a welcome sight as well. This helps system builders as people will continue to get the benefits of their XMP modules even if the CMOS gets cleared or reset for some reason. This was the primary goal when ASUS put the hardware switch on the motherboard and yet another example of applied customer input.
All in all I have no other Z97 motherboards to compare this one to, but compared to the last generation the evolution can’t be denied. ASUS has stepped up its game and set a new standard for others to follow. The Z97 Deluxe may not be for everyone as the bundle and feature set is above and beyond the needs of most people. If you’re looking for a full featured motherboard then I have no doubt that the Z97 Deluxe will make an excellent choice that will only improve as the firmware and drivers mature.
Kyle's Thoughts:
My experience with the ASUS Z97-Deluxe motherboard was nothing short of excellent, with one caveat that I will cover below. My OS and installed without issue and system was up and running quickly. I used the included InstALL software and it worked as it should without issue.
One thing I was hoping to see as we transitioned to this "new" chipset was that Hot Plugging of drives be turned on by default, but that is not the case. You still have to go through and enable hot plugging for each drive header. I wish we would at least see a "master switch" for turning hot plugging on and off for the native SATA devices, but this is a trivial bother at the least.
As Dan’s IO testing ferreted out, there are some issues with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 Asmedia drivers on the Z97 Deluxe. We are going to chalk this up to driver immaturity and the fact that ASUS has focused most of its testing on Windows 8 systems rather than Windows 7 installs like we use for testing. Given that a huge amount of enthusiasts are sticking with Windows 7, we are sure that ASUS will address these issues fairly soon and ASUS has been giving the issues we found attention and replicating our issues with its QA engineers. At time of writing this I think ASUS has replicated all the issues we uncovered.
I had no issues running our benchmarks with our stock 4.5GHz/1866MHz overclocks at the normal 1.28v CPU core voltage. I had some issues when we moved to stress testing our Z97 Deluxe motherboard. The system when running full CPU and RAM loads would BSOD after about three hours with no airflow across the motherboard on an open test bench, which we find most quality Z87 motherboards do not have an issue with. As Dan mentioned in the introduction, the motherboard and cooling employed is very professional and elegant in appearance. I do think however that this cooling is not as robust as what we have seen in the past from ASUS overall. With no airflow, the surface of the heatsinks were 125F, with surface temperatures of the power components measuring 145F. While I did not have the usual amount of time to play with stability testing, I could not find a CPU core voltage that would give us long term high heat stability under Prime95. Moving to 1.32v core voltage seemed to grant us stability, but again, I did not have but a couple days to test and we like to run stability tests over a period of a week if not more.
Moving along to overclocking, we saw some interesting temperature results, as we did during stability testing as well. At our usual 4.5GHz/1866MHz at 1.28v testing, we saw reduced per core CPU temperatures. Under full loads we were seeing in the high 60c to mid 70c range. Normally at these settings we see high 70c to low 80c temperatures. When we moved the CPU core voltage to 1.32v as mentioned above, which gained us better stability, we saw our more "normal" high 70c to low 80c temperatures. We were able to duplicate this temperature behavior on an MSI Z87 test motherboard as well. So overall, we think we are seeing needed higher CPU core voltages to get long term stability under stress, but with this new Z97 platform we are seeing equivalent core temperatures (and lower in some cases shown below) with the higher needed CPU core voltage. Overall, I got a solid 4.6GHz/1866MHz and even was knocking on the door to a solid 4.7GHz/1866MHz and that is not usual for this particular Intel Core i7 4770K.
Certainly not the full load core temperatures you would expect at the clocks and voltages shown.
I was surprised that Dan did not get better overclocking results. I know ASUS has experienced generally slightly better overclocking with the Z97 compared to the previous Z87. I know I experienced this as well. It was not a huge difference, but the Z97 Deluxe simply gave me a better overclock with the exact same hardware we have been using on Z87 motherboards. We are going to be looking at this more for sure.
Using the ASUS Dual Intelligent Processors 5 overclocking software was a great experience. The application works very well, and is very fluid and responsive. Using high CPU power, no targets set, all cores, and 30 second stability tests settings, DIP5 netted me a solid 4.6GHz/1866MHz overclock at 1.278v. We have not seen auto-overclocking results this good on the whole with past Z87 motherboards. Overall a great overclocking result. Running a HandBrake encode and after that Prime95 showed that we had a stable system. Again, we were not able to test for days as is normal.
The Bottom Line
Overall ASUS has done a great job with the first Z97 motherboard that we have gotten to take a look at. Its AI Suite III overclocking software has evolved well and is certainly a benefit to any enthusiast will to give the software a shot, even if you think BIOS-only tweaking is the way to go. The ASUS Z97 Deluxe is an incredibly complete package both in terms of hardware and software. There is certainly some maturation that needs to come forth in terms of IO drivers, at least for Windows 7. The overclocking Dual Intelligent Processors 5 software is some of the best we have seen and quite frankly it might be able to give a better overclocking result than you can tweak by hand, at least in a short period of time.
While the Z97 chipset is short on new features when compared side by side with the Z87, it seems to be a bit better for overclocking our Haswell processors. We are going to have to see some more results from our readers and forum-goers to get a wider sample of results before we make a solid call on that though.
As for the Z97 Deluxe motherboard, the packaged version we are testing is likely to sell for somewhere around the $400 mark. That is a steep price if you are not in the market for Thunderbolt, NFC, or Wireless Charging abilities. Luckily, the Deluxe will be heading up the product stack price-wise currently, and we will see Hero, Gene, Sabertooth, Mark 1, Mark 2, and "A" versions trickle all the way down to the $150 space. As always, we are going to see some enthusiast specific models coming our way that will have circuitry and designs with advanced overclocking in mind.
From an award standpoint, we are going to have to also take a "wait and see" approach. The ASUS Z97 Deluxe certainly has a lot of value if you can leverage its extremely wide feature set. It is very early going in the Z97 arena and surely this platform from ASUS needs some fine polishing, but we are sure that its engineers are already on it.
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