The Board - A Closer Look

Since audio functions are at the forefront with the Biostar Hi-Fi Z97WE, we will look at those first. Like many boards on the market today, the audio design features a well-designed, shielded circuit that is electrically separate from the rest of the board in quite a few places, although its isolation is not as thorough as on some other boards. On the front of the board are a series of audio-specific capacitors and such, all nicely lined up on the link to the rear outputs. This design might not seem as visually impressive as some other similarly designed audio circuits I have covered, yet it performs very well, as you can see by taking a look at the RMAA test results.


Not one to shy away from including a few OC-centric features on their higher-level boards, I did find quite a few on the Hi-Fi Z97WE, including POWER and RESET buttons, an LN2 jumper, and a POST display that lays bare CPU temperatures after the boot sequence completes.


Fintek provides the board with its additional monitoring functions. The large golden heatsink atop the Intel Z97 PCH does a better job at keeping the PCH cool than some other designs I have covered on these pages in weeks past, which impressed itself upon me in a big way as being a multi-GPU user myself, I have run into issues with PCHs overheating, which has affected stability a few times by now.


ASMedia provides the PCI ports' controller, so those of us with PCI devices can still make use of them. Here is another picture of the POST display. I guess showing one just was not quite enough. :p


The Realtek RTL8111G LAN controllers are tiny in size, and both have clock crystals close by. They support Teaming mode for those who want to use such features in order to optimize network traffic.


Fan control and other Super I/O functions are managed by an ITE IT8728F, a common device for such purposes, just like the NXP TMDS controller for the HDMI port on the rear I/O panel.