ASUS Z87-K Pro Reviews

At the current moment the Z87-K is the junior ATX product from ASUS which is based on the Intel Z87 chipset. It is rather simple, lacks any extras like buttons or indicators, and has but a few additional controllers. The mainboard doesn’t even use the chipset’s capabilities to their full extent, being limited to only four USB 3.0 ports and not capable of sharing CPU-based PCIe lanes between graphics slots. Thanks to this simplicity, the product is inexpensive while offering a full set of basic features. That’s actually what makes it so attractive. We have no doubt it is going to be a market success. In this review we've noted its various downsides, from the error that makes the CPU work at a lower than required frequency at high loads to certain flaws in the new BIOS version, but such problems are unavoidable at the early stages of development. We actually like ASUS mainboards. We use them and recommend them to others, so we do hope that any downsides we've found will soon be eliminated. As opposed to the mainboard, our opinion about the LGA1150 platform at large and its particular components is rather pessimistic. First of all, the new series of Intel chipsets are not a big improvement on their predecessors. The additional pair of USB 3.0 ports has little practical worth whereas the transition of all SATA ports to the 6 Gbit/s standard is a long-anticipated but belated innovation since AMD chipsets have long offered such capabilities. These minor improvements would make the new chipset series better than their predecessors anyway if it were not for the recently discovered bug: disks connected via USB 3.0 may get disconnected when switching into sleep mode. This bug will surely be solved but defective chipsets have already gone on sale and it will take months for the release of new revisions. Hopefully, this will be the only problem found in the new chipset series.