14 DAY TRIAL // The word “colorful” is a pretty normal term in English, except for when it gets written with a capital “C.” Then it becomes the name of a pretty complex IT company, one that has just launched a trio of motherboards.
It wasn't too long ago that Colorful only made graphics cards. Well, it made other things, but they mostly got overlooked by pretty much everyone who didn't just stumble over the things while browsing retailers.
Now, though, the corporation is visibly expanding its reach, having established a tentative foothold in the motherboard industry.
In fact, Colorful has brought three mainboards to Computex 2014, all of them powered by the Z97 chipset from Intel.
Intel's Haswell refresh chips have been around for a couple of months and the Devil's Canyon Core i5/i7 unlocked CPUs just came out yesterday too.
That means that there's now a market for 9-Series mainboards, although some are still holding out hope that Z87 ones will gain support for the CPUs as well.
Still, even if it's proven that 9-Series motherboards don't, in fact, have a monopoly over Intel's latest Core-series, Pentium and Celeron chips, the new platforms will sell well for a while. It's always like that during the initial burst.
So what motherboards did Colorful release? They're called Battle Axe Z97 X5, Battle Flag Z97 X5, and iGame Z97 Ymir. All of them not yet priced.
Battle Axe Z97 X5 has four DDR3 DIMM slots, a PCI Express 3.0 x16 add-in card slot, a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot (physical x16, electrical x4), and a PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot too.
There's a normal PCI slot as well, plus an M.2 connector for new SSDs, five SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, four USB 3.0 connectors, 8-channel HD audio, Gigabit Ethernet, and three video outputs (DVI, HDMI, D-Sub). Oh, and the CPU socket is powered by a 9-phase VRM. Not bad for overclocking at all.
The Battle Flag Z97 X5 motherboard resembles the Axe, but has two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots instead of one (x8/x8 when using both), six SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, mSATA, and ground-layer isolation for the 8-channel audio.
Finally, the iGame Z97 Ymir is actually the best in the group, with three PCI Express x 16 (x8/x4.x4) slots), Killer E2200 NIC networking, 8 SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, one mSATA and a monstrous 17-phase CPU VRM. Bizarrely, though, there's no M.2 in sight.
