The Board - A Closer Look

SO, what does it take to make it an EVGA motherboard? Well, it begins with the BIOS and its slightly different BIOS chip. Nestled inside a fully contained socket, it is easily replaceable.


Just above the CPU socket are the POWER and RESET buttons for those that build a rig with this board on a test bench, or for first-time testing and set-up. There are also a couple LEDs in the board's bottom-right corner. These give you an idea of whether the board is drawing power, for example.


A dual-digit POST LED helps you diagnose BOOT issues, while the socket the CPU sits in uses nothing but low-profile components, which allows you to insulate the board and clock your Haswell chip to the moon and back – the EVGA Z87 Stinger is ready and willing.


The CPU VRM is a beefy 6-phase design with a large cooler on top of it to keep all its bits cool should you decide to push the clocks, while the DIMM VRM is a single-phase design, which is more than enough to push two sticks over 2666 MHz.


Although the letters on the controller were really hard to see, VRM control is provided by a Renesas part. A quick look at the CPU VRM cooler shows that the EVGA Z87 Stinger's entire power-management design uses Renesas-built parts.


A Fintek Super I/O hides under the BIOS label, which quite a few brands do, but I would rather see it placed on top of the BIOS chip or socket so as to not confuse end users about what is really under those stickers. Should you need to clear the CMOS by removing the CMOS battery, that is also easily done because of the vertically-mounted CMOS battery.


The Creative Sound Core3D audio CODEC features a proper Creative-built CODEC rather than a Realtek CODEC with some special software, while the board's LAN connectivity uses the standard Intel I217V controller many OEMs use with their Intel Z87-based motherboards.


As the last specialized component EVGA chose to supplement their board's feature set, NXP provides the TMDS controller that shifts the digital signal up for HDMI connectivity. It is now time to put the whole package to the test.