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It has been around a month since Intel launched their new Haswell processors and major players such as Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock and MSI have already released a slew of new motherboards to cater to every price point. So far, we have primarily focused on high end models, so it was interesting to spend some time with a budget board from ASUS this week.
The ASUS Z87-K doesn't make a wonderful first impression. The supplemental bundle has been stripped down to help reduce the overall cost, and ASUS only include two SATA cables along with the motherboard manual and software disc. If you have a Solid State drive and a couple of hard drives for storage, you may need to buy another SATA cable. Realistically however we would expect most people will have some spare SATA cables in a drawer at home.
The motherboard itself will certainly split opinion. The gold/yellow slot colours are rather gaudy and they do not appeal to me at all, I much prefer the Republic Of Gamers red and black aesthetic. I personally feel the gold slots will appeal to the Far East audience, rather than the European or American enthusiast user.
On close inspection it is rather straightforward to tell that this is a budget solution. The heavy duty heatsinks around the CPU socket are all but gone, with only one modestly sized sink primed to cool the VRM's. All of the SATA ports are vertically mounted – a common PCB trait to reduce engineering costs. This may make cable routing a little more difficult, but the ports are adequately positioned so they don't interfere with the installation of large graphics cards in the primary PCI E slot.
The ASUS Z87-K Bios is bulletproof and fully loaded in regards to overclocking. We didn't experience any negative experiences, and indeed the only limitation we encountered were related specifically to our Intel Core i7 4770k engineering sample. Regular readers will be aware that our processor is realistically limited to 4.5ghz, unless we were to use very high end watercooling or phase change. At 1.28 volts @ 4.5ghz, the 4770k peaks at 83c under load when paired up with the Corsair H100i ‘all in one' cooler. We can push higher, but long term damage would occur and we aren't chasing unrealistic figures just for publication.
We have spoken with several UK system builders during the last month and they are limiting overclocking results to between 4.2ghz and 4.4ghz on the systems they sell. Haswell appears to be a hot running chip design and many enthusiast users seem happy with their 3570k or 3770k chip from the previous generation. If you aren't interested in integrated graphics performance there does seem little incentive to spend a wad of cash on a new processor and motherboard this year.
We had no problems loading the XMP profile on the 2,400mhz rated Corsair memory, achieving complete stability without any messy BIOS intervention. In this regard the Z87-K is as good as any other board we have tested to date, regardless of the price.
It would be safe to say that if you are in the market for a new Z87 system and can't afford the most expensive products, then the Z87-K does deserve serious consideration. Technically it proved as solid as the Sabertooth board which we reviewed on launch day, if you can live without all the bells and whistles.
One of the cheapest prices in the UK right now for the ASUS Z87-K is at ARIA, for £101.99 inc vat.
Pros:
- Very stable.
- overclocks as well as other boards we have tested.
- excellent BIOS implementation.
- 2,400mhz memory was stable via XMP.
Cons:
- Not the most attractive looking board.
- weak bundle.
- vertically mounted SATA ports.
- not much in the way of heatsink cooling.
Kitguru says: An excellent ‘no frills' overclocking board for the enthusiast user who needs to monitor his spend.
The gold has always surprised me, it really is ugly on a board. Gigabyte nailed it this generation.
That said, its a minor point when the product is t his good. one to not miss IMO. I know a lot of UK system builders are using them recently and it seems with good reason.
Excellent – was wondering if this was any good or not.
I can live with the gold colours, even if it is fugly
Id like to see a review side by side of the gigabyte £100 board too.
Nice, but I think id get the 4670k right now as the price is much lower, 4770k is very costly.
I note none of these reviews seem to cover the included software the 87-k along with a lot of asus other boards have a problem and random crashing in win8.1 with aisuite 3 installed. asus seem to either dont know or wont answer the problem. This board is currently being rma’d to be replaced by a gigabyte z87 board
I picked up one of these last year, I’m very happy with it. The price of this no-frills mobo meant I could spend more where I needed it most: i5-4670K, 32GB, GTX 760, runs sweet on a 3-monitor setup. And why is everyone obsessed with the colour? It doesnt matter if you have a green mobo with yellow spots, purple RAM cards, and a GPU with red and blue stripes – once the sides are on the case you can’t see it anyway!