The Board - Layout

Covered in yellow and golden highlights, the Biostar Hi-Fi Z97WE makes for a very casual esthetic presence, especially once you start filling it up with parts. As an entry-level product, the Z97WE is fairly well equipped, which leads to a fairly busy surface on both the front and rear.


Smaller heatsink on the MOSFETs out of the way of pretty much any cooler on the market today, the socket area is clean and clear. The back of the socket is equally so, so mounting an after-market CPU cooler to keep your system fast and cool should not pose any problems.


The board's fairly basic slot arrangement consists of PCIe x16, PCIe x1 and PCI slots; there are two of each type. There are four DIMM slots for the standard 32 GB of memory support. Biostar claims to only support 2800 MHz, which is a fair bit lower than most other Intel Z97 chipset boards, but this is of no consequence since speeds over 2400 MHz are not commonly purchased these days.


The board's bottom edge includes headers for audio, USB, and a couple of fans which line up in a row that nearly spans the entire bottom edge, with a couple of buttons for those who like to use test benches like I do when testing boards. With a total of six 4-pin-based fan headers present, fan support on the Biostar Hi-Fi Z97WE is exceptional.


With both DVI and VGA ports and a single HDMI port present, the rear I/O panel has what I like to think of as "legacy" video connectivity. Audio connectivity is of the standard fare, as are the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 plugs, while the PS/2 port is keyboard-only. There are also two LAN ports rather than one. SATA connectivity is limited to the Intel Z97 PCH's six SATA 6 Gb/s ports.


Biostar was nice enough to equip the Hi-Fi Z97WE with a socketed BIOS chip, so you can pop in a new one easily enough should you screw it up while overclocking. There is also the standard-for-Z97 M.2 NGFF slot, situated between the PCIe x16 slots.