OC3D.net posted a preview of some Z97 mobos for those interested.
These are all Asus boards. The Deluxe edition has these specs... I'll include a few pictures of it further down in this post... And some more information. The other boards doesn't feature as much as this one...
There is a staggering amount of connection options on the ASUS Z97 Deluxe. Six SATA 6Gb/s ports stop you having to stare at your motherboard trying to make sure you don't plug your shiny new SSD into a SATA II port. Next to them are the four SATA Express ports which, if they perform in the real world as well as they do on paper will quickly lead to us all upgrading our storage devices. Who doesn't want a 10Gb/s transfer rate. Especially without the fiddling about of a RAID setup. Round the back it's like a dream come true with plenty of display outputs, 10 (count em) USB ports, twin LAN and the usual audio jacks. This certainly lives up to the Deluxe name.
Two of the adaptors supplied with the ASUS Z97 Deluxe neatly encapsulate how some technologies have captured the imagination and others haven't. Firstly there is the WiFi Go!. WiFi is now absolutely everywhere in our lives, to the point that when you're somewhere and can't get a wireless signal it comes as a surprise. Anything that can remove the spaghetti from behind our towers has to be a good thing, and equally saving us having to buy an adaptor is good news for all.
The second one is the ThunderboltEX II technology card, which is one of the recent developments from Intel that has all the potential to be amazing, without grabbing the attention in the same way that USB did. It has enormous bandwidth, plenty of chaining potential and can provide a good amount of power for your devices. We still can't think of anything we've come across that utilises it though. Hopefully as the 4K displays become more common then the need for Thunderbolt will mean that ASUS are ahead of the game.
Two other things that take wireless technologies to the next level are the Wireless Charger, which does exactly what it says on the tin, and hte NFC Express 2. With more and more devices (televisions, smartphones etc) supporting Near Field Communication (NFC) then it makes perfect sense to include something that allows us to connect our devices in the easiest possible manner. We definitely take our hat off to ASUS with this one. It's fun to get something you didn't realise you needed until it was in front of you.
So there we have it. The triumvirate of ASUS Z97 motherboards that support both the 4th Generation Haswell CPUs and the soon to be released 14nm Broadwell ones too.
I do wonder if they mean that you can run three cards with 3rd 8x speed and one 2nd with 16x speed or not... Or if the last one is throttled to 4x if the other ones are in use.
What do you guys think of it?
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