The Board - A Closer Look

With a socketed BIOS on nearly every product they sell, even value-oriented ones like the Z97-A, ASUS always seems to keep true enthusiasts and performance-seekers in mind. With its matching light yet effective heatsinks on both the Z97's CPU power supply and the Z97 PCH, cooling is more than adequate. Each cooler features a stylized design that not only looks good, but is also pretty effective in cooling down these critical components.


The DIMMs' power supply features a dual-phase component layout. A bigger part than most will need, it ensures good efficiency and the ability to hit those 3200 MHz clocks, provided the right memory and a good CPU are fitted to the board. This over-built design is part of keeping the board reliable during heavy long-term use, so you won't have to be afraid of pushing things a bit if you want to get the most performance out of your system. I also found an ASMedia ASM1082 PCI controller for legacy PCI slot support.


I was really impressed by the fact that all the Z97-A's functionality has been put into just a quad-layered PCB; ASUS obviously takes some pride in it as well since a window in the corner clearly shows how many layers there are.


The fantastic fan control is in part due the Nuvoton NCT6791D Super I/O. The Nuvoton NCT6791D also adds thermal sensor support, made possible by a separately available thermal probe attached to a couple of pins under the Clear_CMOS header.


My favorite part of many mainstream ASUS designs is obviously the "TPU" chip, though it actually stands for "Turbo Processing Unit" rather than TechPowerUp, but we can pretend, can't we? And since we at TPU like to build test benches and crunching rigs, sometimes without a case, there is also that power switch on the board's bottom edge for you to power up your tech without any additional parts.


That's not the only switch on the ASUS Z97-A as there is also the "TPU" switch for two levels of an automatic overclock without ever having to enter the board's BIOS and the "EPU" switch to make sure the board is set to run in its most power-efficient mode, which many GPU crunchers will want. ASUS also included an "XMP" switch, so you don't have to enter the BIOS to get your memory set up, either. Just flip these switches to enable the settings you want and you can boot your pre-imaged OS without ever having to mash that "DEL" key to configure things properly.


Once you press the power switch, the system will power up, with a series of LEDs in different places lighting up in quick succession to indicate which phase of the boot process the board is in, so you will have a good idea of the area with a problem should that boot fail; CPU and DRAM LEDs obviously light up first.


After those two, VGA and BOOT device LEDs will light up, although you might miss those if you have Window8/8.1 installed and FAST BOOT enabled, as it all happens so quickly. That's part of why having all those hardware switches here on the Z97-A is so special. ;)


The Z97-A uses a fairly fancy-looking new audio design, Crystal Sound2. It features EMI-shielded CODECs and an isolated circuit to eliminate any noise. With so much here already, it is pretty awesome that such was still possible, the clear line easily visible with some backlighting.