The Board - Layout

I really love the new look ASUS has here with the Z97-DELUXE, with more black and a much more subdued golden color to the heatsinks. The golden color is of a pleasing tone that catches and reflects light nicely. The rear of the board has both VRM components and some other stuff mounted to its surface, so you will want to take extra care while installing the board.


Surrounded on all sides, the socket itself has quite the visual presence. The back of the socket equally so, with a fair bit of stuff close-by.


Dropping all legacy connectivity here, The ASUS Z97-DELUXE has three PCIe x16 slots and four PCIe x1 slots. There are four DIMM slots with support for a total of 32 GB at speeds of up to 3300 MHz with an OC.


The board's bottom edge has a bunch of buttons for those of you that use a test bench or like to reach into your case, as well as a header for that Thunderbolt card and a POST LED indicator. The right side's bottom edge houses all the usual pin headers you would expect to be there. There are six 4-pin fan headers spaced across the Z97-DELUXE, all with fairly decent fan controls in the BIOS.


The rear I/O towers come with dual-LAN, HDMI, DisplayPort, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and the usual analogue and optical-audio ports. There is also a single Thunderbolt header, but no old legacy PS/2 connector. The board comes with a dual-port SATA Express header and six other "regular" SATA 6 Gb/s ports, although two of those six depend on an ASMedia controller, not the Intel Z97 PCH.


The BIOS chip on the Z97-DELUXE sits in a socket that allows it to be replaced if need be. Just under the PCH cooler sits the M.2 port, which also uses the Intel Z97 PCH to connect to the system.