However, and this might be a little personal, I do start to dislike the brown/beige stuff on the SaberTooth for some reason. ![]() Admittedly, the shields do look nice in an all black PC case, combine it with some liquid cooling on the processor and things will start to look rather shweeeeeet. I'll leave that to you to decide, as I unfortunately am an uber-sceptic. Now we can discuss back and forth what the added benefit of the shielding is and if the prognosed airflow improvements actually make a difference. The back-plate shield kicks ass, and makes this a very sturdy motherboard. ![]() You do get SATA Express, but you can't purchase any compatible SSDs whilst M.2 is available wide spread. I absolutely fail to see as to why there is no M.2 interface though, huge miss. So storage wise there's just really little to complain about. Four of them are provided by the Intel Z97 chipset and two more are controlled by ASMedia ICs, and these have become pretty decent really. StorageĬombined with six SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly argue anything. But performance wise on all fronts, CPU, storage and memory this Z97 Gaming AC performs extremely well. All manufacturers apply this tweak with their high-end SKUs though. MSI applied a small tweak on the processor's turbos so you'll see them hovering at 3900/4000 MHz a bit faster than they are supposed to go. But before we talk dirty tweakin' we must state that the overall baseline (non overclocked) performance is top notch as well. So pop a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4600 MHz range with a 4770K easily. It's easy to navigate through with and without a mouse and a couple of new features like the monitoring pages just kick black booty. The latest iteration of the MSI Click BIOS uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. See the motherboard manufacturers simply went nuts with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The big conundrum however is this: Z97 motherboards can be very interesting if you are in need of an upgrade. Even coming from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors and the Z77 platform will not change my mind about this recommendation. But if you purchased a Z87 motherboard and a Haswell processor last year already, by all means there is just no reason to upgrade whatsoever. There are a couple of differences that the chipset however offers, and that's making PCI-E storage units compatible with standards like SATA Express and M.2 PCI-E SSDs. Now, the Intel Z97 chipset all by itself is not really interesting from an upgrade point of view if you bought a PC in say the last two years. Please do read our ASUS Z97-A review as well, as that board is sheer value for money at only 125 EUR! The Platform & The Motherboard Obviously ASUS has an extensive range of motherboard for each price segment. The benefit is that it could be a lower cost motherboard, we expect it to be at or under the 200 EUR marker. But yeah the TUF series always has been designed with an affordable budget in mind. Obviously ASUS has an extensive range of motherboard for each price segment. So upgrade wise, this makes no sense whatsoever. Well aside from a tweak in the thermal armor. ![]() In fact aside from Sata Express which NOBODY has or uses, the difference inbetween the Z87 and Z97 model are almost NIL. no extra KillerNIC, WIFI, buttons, Diagnostic LEDS and so on. Opposed to our recent reviews from say MSI and others, this board is more price savvy, and you can see why. ASUS has a lovely offering with the new Z97 SaberTooth mark 1.
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