04.05.2024

What's up guys. ben here for player.net and today we're. taking a look at the asus. z97k motherboard now this is of course. as mentioned already one of the new z97. motherboards. um lga 1150 so it supports the current. as well and has well refreshed. processors. as well as the upcoming broadwell. processes. as you can see here just quickly on the. front of the box we of course have our. asus branding up in the top right. it lets us know our model number right. here right below it. and it tells we've got a big um kind of. badge saying that it gives us five. times protection this and down at the. bottom left it says proven quality. enduring trust and it just goes on again. to reinforce that five times protection. a thousand plus compatible devices and. seven. thousand plus validation hours. we can also notice that this of course.

Does support the incel core inside. as mentioned the lga 1150 socket. it supports amd crossfire and it says. it's windows 8.1 and. hdmi ready. moving on to the back of the box as we. normally see with motherboards there's a. lot more. information here we of course have. um a nice picture of our motherboard. with a diagram detailing us. all the specific points and components. of the motherboard. of course it lets us know that our intel. z97 chipset is under this nice asus. heatsink here we of course have our pci. express. 3.0 slot which is of course 2.0. backwards compatible. then it just goes on to let us know. where our audio vga ports ddr3 ram. up to 3200 megahertz and oc mode. and stuff like that and then if you look. around the box. it goes into a bit more detailed. information on some of those features. let's go ahead and have a quick look in.

The box and see what we have. all right this is a bit different. as we can see here set the motherboards. aside for a minute we take a look. um i see hiding in here. was of course some sata3 cables. 6.0 gigabytes per second these have a. nice design to them. there's two of them in this pack we have. our. safety information booklet. we have a quick start guide and of. course. there it is we have our user guide. and our z97 series. driver disk and there is. a little asus um badge in there for to. go ahead and put on our case. uh as always i would recommend you go to. the asus site. and download the latest drivers and. everything. right from them go ahead and get the. latest bios. especially on these z97 boards as they. are very new. so guarantee the bios are probably. almost already outdated and there'll be. more releases coming shortly as well.

And last but not least we have our io. back plate which is um. just a generic silver one nothing fancy. but. it's not too bad either. take a quick look at the motherboard. itself. up live and in person. all right. so here we have the asus z97k. and as mentioned we of course have our. pci. 3.0 lane. we have this nice heatsink that's. covering our z97 chipset. the other heatsink up here which is. quite nice um. gold to match this one. we have our ram and um the pcb itself. kinda looks like it's uh. a dark gray ish if i will. it also looks like this board may have. another one of the audio trace lights. here. i'm not positive i can't guarantee that. yet but when i. go ahead and get this plugged in and. installed in a few minutes i'll be able. to have a look. this is my first look at the board and. one thing i'm already noticing.

Is how they have split the sata ports up. we have our we have two. sata six gigabyte ports up here so it. should be six. pardon that'll be our set of three 6.0. gigabyte ports. and then there's four more down here so. it's kind of. i'm guessing it's to do with how the. heatsink is positioned on this board the. asus kind of had to. differentiate from the norm a bit go. ahead and put them in a couple different. places. other than that it looks pretty generic. we of course have all our front panel. headers. and usb headers down here there are some. fan headers. scattered across the board we of course. have our usb. 3 here ram slots a cpu. socket which of course has our nice. protection thing on it as you'll see. here. uh the socket itself the retention. bracket. is a nice silver so moving on. to the rear the i o um. back plate backspace whatever you like.

To call it. pardon me we of course have our generic. audio jacks here we have our two point. our yeah two 2.0 the usb 2 ports pardon. me. of course with our lan on top four usb. 3s our hdmi vga slash dsub. and our dvi connectors for our output to. our monitors and then we of course. have our ps2 mouse and keyboard. connections. overall this board looks very generic. but not so much in that of a bad way it. of course still has the m2. um socket right here i don't know if you. can see it it's probably a bit hard but. of course has that so it's always nice. to see. especially on the z97 boards but it. looks. like i said it looks like a nice generic. um maybe an entry level board i forgot. to check the price on it but i'll. of course include that in the review i'm. looking forward to getting it in my. system and trying it out and seeing how.

well. it performs thank you for watching. please like comment subscribe leave. feedback and check back for more content. in the near future