I have been researching for quite a while and I can't decide! Any opinions on which is the best?
Canditates:
MSi Z97A Gaming 7
ASUS ROG Maximus VII Hero Z97
ASUS Z97-A LGA 1150 Intel Z97
The Hero is the best one, in my opinion. Better built than the other two.
Have you used it?
Nah, but it has a good reputation. A lot of people use it, and it has pretty solid power delivery.
Out of the ones you listed all of them will do but I would say this:
Either go Maximus VII hero for the intel NIC and overall high quality build or go Z97A Gaming 7 for USB 3.1 and an extra PCIe 1x slot and I believe slightly better on-board audio.
But really you can't go wrong with either of them, I would personally go MSI since I have had dreadful experience with ASUS customer support and pretty good support from MSI
That's what I had in mind, but I read online that Asus doesn't use high quality capacitors on this particular motherboard while msi does and this is what makes it difficult to decide.
Asus Sabertooth z97 beats everything, it has all the ROG features but with top durability
Sabertooth´s are exaly a bit diffrent then ROG boards.
Diffrent lower quality onboard audio, No keybot, diffrent vreg design.
etc etc.
about the listed boards, basicly you cant go wrong with either of them.
But the Asus Maximus VII Hero is indeed the best of those 3.
THe Maximus VII Hero has better build quality, like allready mentioned above.
It has an intel nic which i personaly prefer over killer.
Next to that, it has a way better vreg design than the Msi.
The Asus M7 Hero, has a 8 true powerphase and digi vrm, 60A blackwing chokes, and 10k premium caps.
Next to that, the Asus ROG boards, have one of the most overclock friendly biosses out there, But thats of course a personal thing.
It also has great onboard audio.
The Msi Gaming 7, offers allot of feutures for the money, good onboard audio.
But of course the vreg design isnt that decent as that on the Asus M7 Hero.
However, since Haswell chips have na IVR onboard, it basicly just a matter of silicon luck, to how far you can overclock the cpu.
The Vreg design is a bit less improtant on Z97.
But of course the higher quality build boards, do ofc offer more feutures to fine tune an overclock.
Mmmmm I'm just over here enjoying my Soc force.... But yes the hero is the best board of the three
Yeah the Soc force is an overclockers oriented board.
I personaly dont have experiances with it, but i supose that they are fine aswell.
Do you know, if any of the issues with crashing Bios, that the X99 gigabyte boards had.
Was also an issue on Z97?
Nope, that bios is bulletproof. So so so detailed and well written. I am going to be using DICE and LN2 with it eventually so that's why I got it
yeah i know its designed for LN2 pot use.
So the Z97 boards, dont have the bios crash issues then.
Not from my experience with it so far. I will let you know if it does though
Yeah, maybe I will go with Asus ROG. I was considering MSi because it has 3 PCIe 3.0 and USB 3.1, but I have been using an Asus board for years, it hasn't failed me once and it is a bit cheaper.
The Haswell chips only have 16 pcie lanes, so you can't really take advantage of the 3 pcie x16 slots, at least with Nvidia cards.
Three graphics cards together would run at x8, x4, x4 and, to my knowledge, Nvidia SLI doesn't even support x4. It would work with AMD cards, though, but the low bandwidth would be a bit of a bottleneck. Basically, the most graphics cards you should realistically run in a Z97 system is two.
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I read about that on the specs lists for both of the motherboards but I was thinking about future cards, like the Fury X and future NVIDIA cards.
There are a very few Z97 boards who have a plx chip onboard.
But those are a bit expensive.
I forgot about plx chips. Apparently the latest generation don't introduce much latency. But yeah, those boards are more expensive.
list of Z97 boards with plx out of my head.
1: Asrock Z97 Extreme 9
2: Asus Z97 WS
3: Gigabyte GA-Z97X Gaming G1 + Wifi-BK
4: Gigabyte GA-Z97X Gaming G1
5: Gigabyte GA-Z97X Gaming GT
6: Msi Z97 Xpower AC
But honnestly i dont realy think you should go with more then 2 gpu´s on the Z97 platform.
If you realy want triple or Quad sli / CF, then X99 would be a better way to go imo.