14 DAY TRIAL // There have been quite a few Z97 motherboards coming out or getting prematurely leaked recently, but the one that ASUS is preparing, or at least one of them, is unusual in that it's not made for consumer systems.
That's right, the mainboard we're about to show you isn't intended for desktop PCs, be they mid-range mid-towers to high-end tower gaming systems or business PCs.
The Z97 chipset isn't really that well suited for business systems, because it's too overpowered for such computers. Even mainstream PCs are almost beneath its purview.
Still, the new motherboard, while definitely on par, feature-wise, with gaming and enthusiast overclocking models, isn't actually made for such things.
Instead, it is aimed at workstations, the type of professional PCs used in video and game editing, or other resource-intensive tasks of that nature.
Called Z97 WS, the motherboard will be at its best when equipped with a Xeon processor based on the Haswell silicon.
Most high-end Xeons use LGA 2011 sockets, but there are LGA 1150 Haswell Xeons too, and there soon will be Xeons based on the recent, fourth generation.
Right now, only Celeron, Pentium and Core-series Haswell fourth-gen chips exist, and we're still waiting on Devil's Canyon (K-type, unlocked Core CPUs). Xeons should show up gradually too though.
Anyway, the ASUS Z97 WS ATX motherboard has an 8-phase CPU VRM (voltage regulation module) which gets its power from a pair of EPS connectors.
A 24-pin ATX connector exists of course, as well as an optional 6-pin PCIe power input that will stabilize power supply to add-on cards. Good for when you have more than one. And since this is a workstation platform with four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, it's quite likely to be used with quad-card SLI (NVIDIA) or CrossFireX (AMD) setups.
Moving on, there are two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots available also, plus a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot and eight STA 6.0 Gbps ports (lots of SSDs, HDDs, HHDS/SSHDs to be had). Four convert to two SATA-Express even (for up to 800 MB/s transfers).
8-channel audio, DisplayPort/HDMI video outputs, an M.2 slot and USB 3.0 connectivity (several ports/headers) round up the feature set. Finally, the MOSFETs have heatsinks.
Sadly, the report that exposed the impending arrival of the ASUS Z97 WS motherboard didn't have a price to share.