ASUS ATX DDR3 2600 LGA 1150 Motherboards Z97-A/USB 3.1

I've only been running this board for about a week, so I can't address it's long term durability/stability. It has, however, run flawlessly 24/7 since I've installed it. It looks like this board is the successor to the veritable Asus Z97-A. I purchased this board for new build. It's an upgrade from an old Core 2 Duo (e8500), which ran on an MSI micro-atx board with 4GB DDR2.My new build on this board currently has:i7 4790k8GB gSkill Ripjaws DDR3 1600MHzSamsung 850 Pro 256GB ssdWestern Digital Blue 640GB Hard DiskAMD Radeon HD6750 1GB DDR5 (yes, it's old)Corsair Builder Series CX600 power supplyCooler Master 212 EvoNZXT Source 210 Midtower Case w/USB 3.0As you can see, even though I plan on acquiring a much better video card (likely a GTX970 3.5/4GB or R9 3xx when they arrive) and another 8 gigs of ram, this is a significant upgrade to my old machine. It's pretty great.Getting back to the motherboard itself, my experience from start to finish has been great. The motherboard arrived securely packed in a thick box inside an obligatory static bag. It comes with 3 Sata6 cables, a Crossfire/SLI bridge, a I/O back plate for your case, CD with drivers, a features booklet, and a beefy user manual. I did not use the driver CD, however, a fresh install install of Windows 8.1 did not recognize the Intel network adapter, so I got them from the Intel website. Also, if you choose not to use the CD, Asus' website has all the individual drivers and utilities. Aside from the network adapter, I went to Intel's site to get the SBChipset drivers because Windows didn't recognize that as well - I'd definitely recommend doing this also. On another note, it's really worth mentioning that Asus's documentation is excellent. It's clearly written, detailed, logically ordered. Five stars for the technical writers.The board itself has a clean, sharp aesthetic and is logically laid out. Although it does feel a slightly "flexy", I do not see this as being problematic whatsoever. There are plenty of connectors (sata, usb, fans, etc) for nearly anyone needs, and it's all clearly and accurately denoted in the user manual. My components listed above all installed without a hitch and run excellently. The CPU, ssd, ram, etc, all were "recognized" immediately, and they are fast. I don't have any USB 3.1 devices, but it's nice to have the two ports in the back for future devices that might use the newer 10Gbps throughput. I did get an extension cable so that I can access them easier from the front. I also don't have any M2 or sata express devices, but this board supports them, which is nice.The bios is very cleanly laid out, and it recognized my wireless name brand mouse immediately. I haven't done any overclocking, so I can't attest to this boards abilities yet, but there appears to be a wide variety of options and tweaks which would likely satisfy most users interested in overclocking. Additionally, it look's like you can save multiple overclocking profiles for CPU/ram. Lastly, the bios seems to regulate the temps on the i7 via the Evo212 very nicely. It's quiet and effective, and I haven't had to do any tweaks in that department.All in all, I'm very satisfied with this board. It has an expansive feature set at a very decent price, and providing it lives up to Asus's reputation for durable, quality electronics, I'm sure this board will more than satisfy my needs for many years down the road. If your looking for a quality Z97 board in this price range, this is a great option. I have no doubt that demanding gamers, content creators, or technical users would find this board to be a solid basis for a machine.

This is the first MoBo I've bought that wasn't a bare bones entry level model. I'm currently kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Right out of the box, everything has worked as advertised. There are plenty of empty slots, LOTS of USB 3.0 ports, and the BIOS is easy-peasy to mess around with.Speaking of the BIOS, ASUS's auto-overclock function is awesome, if not a little overly aggressive, at least in my case. I'm a lazy newbie to overclocking, so I just let the GPUTweak function do it's thing. It worked great, measurably increased the speed of my system, BUT went just a little to far with the muliplier, causing a blue screen when I was testing it out with some heavy video editing. No matter, the gave me a baseline to start from, and I just backed off a notch from the auto settings and everything has been fine ever since. I imagine if I knew a little more about OCing I would have been able to keep the multiplier the same by adjusting voltage or something, but that's too much like work for me. As it stands, I measure a 15% increase in CPU speed over stock (i7 4790K).I mentioned the USB 3.0 ports for a reason, BTW. My previous MoBo, an entry-level Asrock, had 3.0 as well, HOWEVER... The implementation didn't seem to work very well. I have no idea what the cause was, but I never felt as if I was achieving the full speed potential of 3.0. Not any more. It finally works as I expected to, in other words, FAST. As it's supposed to be.All in all, it's a great board. Affordable, fast, with enough bells and whistles for me. It gets my stamp of approval.

I have used ASUS boards for about 10 years and this one has been the best yet. I paired it with an i5-4690k and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY16GX3M2A1600C9R. First boot was flawless, everything worked perfectly. Once I had my OS up and running I ran a stability test and everything was perfectly stable for 24 hours. My next step was overclocking. I use a custom watercooling loop so I can push things as far as I can to get the most bang for the buck. Usually I don't trust the "auto tuning" of motherboards but I decided to give the feature a try just to see what it could do. So after using the "Auto System Level Up!" I was pleasantly surprised to see it take the CPU from 3.5GHZ to 4.6GHZ (102x45) @ 1.30vcore with just a couple mouse clicks and a reboot. I was skeptical as to how stable it could be so I ran another 24 hour stress test and there wasn't a single hiccup. Now I may have gotten lucky, but for an effortless auto overclock this is pretty impressive. My CPU temps hover around 60c under full benchmark load, which leads me to believe I could probably back the voltage down a bit to help with temps or possibly push for 4.7-4.8GHZ. Either way, that is on the CPU, not the motherboard. The ability to jump to this high of a performance without any effort at all is the result of the board and the software.The only think I am not very fond of is the yellow led's on the back side of the board behind the PCI slots. It shines a yellow light through some translucent strips along the PCI connectors that doesn't really jive with the black/blue theme of my pc, but I can live with it. I am not going to take a star off just for a couple LED's that do not affect the functionality one little bit.All in all, I am very pleased with the board and would recommend it to anybody wanting a board with some headroom at a reasonable price.