The Board - Layout

Outer box, inner box, accessories, bubble wrap, and anti-static bag removed, I finally got my hands on the EVGA Z87 Stinger. A mad mess of parts on both front and back, it felt good in my hands.


There was a sticker over the socket itself, which I will show you in a moment. All components around the socket are low-profile to aid with insulation should you take this board down that road. The rear of the socket is fairly clear, but there are a few surface-mounted bits near one of the mounting holes.


The single PCIe x16 slot features a clip-less design that clamps onto the installed VGA lightly. The two DIMM slots, which were also covered by a sticker, each, (more on that later) support DIMMs of up to 8 GB in size, which has the board officially support 16 GB of 2666 MHz RAM in total. Getting higher clocks was not much of a problem, but will be CPU-dependent.


The front panel pin block is just to the right and toward the bottom of the DIMMs, in a good location for case wiring. Also at the board's edge are three 4-pin PWM-based fan headers, which makes wiring simple.


There is a USB 2.0 header by the rear I/O towers. Although pretty clearly labeled, it hides under a black plastic cap that sits over the header. The USB 3.0 header right next to the upright-mounted CMOS battery has a similar dust cap on it.


The rear I/O is fitted with four USB 2.0 and four USB 3.0 ports, and a single eSATA and LAN port, each. There are the usual five audio ports and an optical SPDIF port. What room is left is occupied by HDMI, DisplayPort, Bluetooth, and antenna, and a CLEAR_CMOS button. All powered by Intel's Z87 chipset, there are only four internal SATA 6 Gb/s headers.