ASUS Z87 PRO LGA 1150 Motherboard

This is a very nice board, I love all the USB 3 inputs and the SATA 6.0 connectors. The Bios and overclocking is easy to use. The Fan Xpert 2 works great and gives me a truly silent case. I am not a power user, so getting a silent case is easier than many others could achieve. With the Noctua fans and cpu heat sink and the Corsair Professional Series HX850W has made for a silent case. The only thing I hear is when the hard drives (2 WD Black 1 TB, and 1 WD Black 500 GB) fire up.One thing users will want to be wary of, when first starting up my Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard would not work in the USB 3.0 ports, they had to use the 2.0 ports (I plugged them into the front of the case). After downloading the latest drivers from Logitech these now work in the 3.0 ports on the back.I built a new computer and used this board for using with Lightroom and 3rd party software. That is the reason for the large hard drives and i7 cpu. The larger hard drive is to give me greater longevity, at least as my understanding regarding the degradation of PSU's over time. The old computer was locking up with even small photos a few MB's in size. Transfering and working with photos is now much faster.Storm Scout 2 Mid Tower Casei7 4770kWD Black Hard DrivesCorsair Professional Series HX850W Power SupplyNoctua FansNoctua CPU Heat Sink and FanEVGA GeForce GT 640 4GB GDDR3 PCIeAsus 24x DVDRW SATA OEMUltra Universal Vibration Dampener for ATX PSU

I love the 4-way optimization, as an over-clocker from a long time back I just want to say that the implementation of this software is really nice to use and I really cannot imagine why I would want to tweak any further. I am not going to reiterate some of the great things said about this ASUS Z87 PRO motherboard, the reviews so far here seem very accurate. I am just going to relay my experience which highlights just a couple of nice features on this board.The hardware:Z87 Pro MBI5 4670K CPUKingston Genesis RAM listed in QVLNoctua NH-D14 cooler ( the Big one!)HAF XB caseI cranked up the ambient temperature in my room to about 75F4 way optimization first try:The process went great and it OC'd to 4.7. I started a game and crash. Hmm.... not to happy. repeated with another game... crash. I dialed the OC back to 4.6 on all cores and no problems. I saved that profile, but upon reboot it reverted back to the original OC so instability again unless I manually loaded my stable profile. Is there something I do not understand about this software?Please do not take my description below as instructions on how to flash a BIOS. Consult the ASUS site and manual.I have always been nervous about BIOS updates, but what the heck, this board is built for it, right? So I downloaded the 1405 update from ASUS, unzipped it, renamed it according to the manual and placed it on a formatted thumb drive. I powered down the PC. Placed the thumb drive in the BIOS Flashback port and pressed the flashback button on the motherboard until it started to blink. I stood there watching it blink for maybe 6 or 7 seconds, I waited a few more then powered up. BIOS update successful. Fantastic.I then ran 4-Way Optimization again and the result was.... you guessed it 4.6 and it has been very stable.Final Thoughts:If I did this build again I would update the BIOS before I installed anything on the board, this is possible to do with the flashback button, a really nice feature.I was going to be happy with anything over 4.4 for the 4670k.The Noctua NH-D14 may be a bit of an overkill with this chip, the OC did not come close to failing due to thermals.

This review is from the perspective of a gamer/hardware enthusiast. While I do like to stay up to date with the latest hardware, I like to get the most performance for my dollar. I will also detail my adventure in taking advantage of a full UEFI boot, making my OS startup and shutdown process lightning fast.I usually upgrade my motherboard and CPU on the cadence of Intel's tock (e.g. Ivy Bridge = die shrink, Haswell = Architecture change). Coming from the second generation "Sandy Bridge" CPU and motherboard combo, I'm pleased with the features, connectivity, and stability of this board.Board Layout:ASUS followed a pretty standard ATX layout in regards to CPU socket, memory slots, and other assorted interconnects. I use a large Noctura heatsink that fits on this board despite the pin change from 1155 to 1150. Unfortunately I was not able to install the second fan on the heatsink that draws air in as the installed memory DIMMs were in the way.Features:There is plenty of additional connectivity with a front USB 3.0 header, (3) full x16 PCI-E slots, and (4) SATA III ports provided by the Intel controller. I run a SLI configuration with two NVIDIA GTX680s and was able to fit them comfortably on the board. Granted the Z87 chipset only has enough PCI-E bandwidth to run them at x8, there is still plenty of headroom so that the graphics cards aren't able to saturate it.The Z87 Pro surprisingly has an Intel NIC onboard instead of a cheaper Realtek or Atheros solution. This is great if you plan on using this board for a VMware Hypervisor or a non-windows OS as the drivers for the NIC will be much easier to come by as well as better general network performance.Speaking of Realtek, it also has an upgraded audio chipset as compared to most other Haswell motherboards. In real-world usage, I'm not quite sure that there's much of a difference in audio quality. Downloading the latest drivers from Realtek is a must as I had noise issues with the Windows stock drivers.The UEFI BIOS is chocked full of functionality and overclocking options. With my previous motherboard/cpu, I was able to overclock it to a stable 4.4GHz. This time around, I was only able to get 4.2GHz, but I think it's the Haswell CPU (i7 4770k) than the motherboard.UEFI Boot:The Z87 Pro also has support for full UEFI boot, eliminating the motherboard POST routine and handing the hardware directly to the OS. This is quite a tricky feat as there are a number of factors that need to be in place for it to work.First, you'll need a UEFI enabled OS such as Windows 7 or 8. Next, you need to have a UEFI BIOS installed on your graphics card (as I'm assuming you won't be using the integrated one). Tracking down a suitable BIOS for my GTX 680s was an endeavor all in itself. Most GPU manufacturers aren't releasing the updated BIOSes on the downloads page of their cards in fear of users bricking the card during the update process. You'll have to hunt for it in their support forums.After completing that fun task, you have to disable the Compatibility Support Manager (CSM) in the BIOS. This feature allows for a hybrid UEFI/legacy boot if you don't have a fully UEFI capable system and adds a couple of seconds to the boot process. Since I was shooting for a full UEFI boot, the CSM had to be disabled.Now you'll be able to boot directly from your boot media within the BIOS to install the OS. Ensure it has "UEFI" in the title so that you will be booting into a UEFI enabled setup otherwise you will install the non UEFI aware boot portion of the OS.Stability:After finding the limit of my CPU's overclock, I have yet to have the board crash. The drivers for all of the components on the board are pretty stable sans the USB 3.0 that comes with Windows 8. You'll need to force it to update in the device manager through windows update to get the stable version of the driver. In Windows 7, you'll have to manually load the driver.Overall Verdict:ASUS created a mid range board with great value. Plenty of options to customize it the way that you choose and stable performance. You might be able to save a couple extra dollars going with the lower end version of this board if you don't need all the bells and whistles, but if this is going to be your next major upgrade, you might as well as go for the Z87 Pro.