We’ll now move in for a closer look at the different features found on Z87-A, starting with the socket area. This motherboard is of course designed to work with Intel’s 4th Generation of processors – Haswell. The socket is LGA1150 but has the mounting holes for LGA115X so if you have a cooler that has been used on another socket such as LGA1155 then it will work fine here too. ASUS have actually included dual fan headers for the CPU cooler just beside the top heatsink which we are pleased to see.

Around the socket the CPU has been given eight fully digital phases – whilst the memory have been given a further two. Ironically, covering the MOSFETs are two rather lack-lustre heatsinks. Whilst they may be much smaller than we have seen on other motherboards, one particular aspect is in its favour – CPU cooler clearance.

Behind the heatsinks is an 8-pin EPS port for CPU power delivery. Furthermore Z87-A and all other ASUS motherboards now have Dual Intelligent Processors 2 which brings in DIGI+VRM – a fully digital power design system.

Due to Z87-A being a value for money, mainstream offering – the components used on this motherboard are standard phases and capacitors rather than the premium parts found on models such as the recently reviewed Maximus VI Hero.



Turning our attention to the memory slots – there is dual channel DDR3 support. Z87-A has support for 32GB capacity and up to 3000(OC). There are a single set of clips on the right side rather than on both sides.

On the corner, ASUS have placed MemOK! Button which provides a failsafe boot with troublesome memory modules. On the other side of the 24-pin ATX power is a single USB 3.0 header for gaining USB 3.0 connectivity at the front of the case.



Further along the motherboard are six SATA 3 (6GB/s) ports. No longer do we have SATA 2, and since SATA 3 is backwards compatible older SATA 2 devices will work fine anyway, their speed will just be capped.

Next to the SATA ports are the two switches: TPU and EPU. TPU allows for an automatic adjustment to the CPU ratio and clock speed. Ratio can be altered and BCLK because this switch has three modes which include disable. With EPU enabled the current loads are altered to moderate the power consumption. It’s important to only modify this switch when the system is powered down.

Behind the SATA ports sits the Z87 chip which is covered by a small golden heatsink. The Z87 chip delivers functionality such as SATA/USB and more.





Z87-A has a good assortment of different expansion slots – the PCI-E supports NVIDIA SLI for multi-GPU configuration. The slots are as follows:

1 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot - Yellow (Running @x16)
1 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot - Black (Running @x8)
1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot - BLACK (Running @x4)
2 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot - Yellow
2 x PCI legacy slot

If you are planning to use a single graphics card, use the top slot since this runs at x16.

Below the expansion slots is a direct key button – this allows entry into the BIOS with a single click. Therefore there is no need to repeatedly hit the delete button and no need for a keyboard.



The rear IO section of Z87-A has a plethora of functionality which include the following:

• 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port(s)
• 1 x DVI-D
• 1 x D-Sub
• 1 x DisplayPort
• 1 x HDMI
• 1 x Gigabit LAN (RJ45) port
• 4 x USB 3.0 (blue)
• 2 x USB 2.0
• 1 x Optical S/PDIF out
• 6 x Audio jacks

The respective video ports are to work in conjunction with integrated graphics from Haswell – its nice to see such a varied selection of options here. The audio jacks are given their audio support via Realtekฎ ALC892 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC.