ASUS Z87-DELUXE/DUAL LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: -Loads of features -Easy to use UEFI BIOS -Looks great -Runs well (now, see cons)

Cons: -Driver DVD was incorrectly made so it was unreadable by my machine (and all other machines I tried to use it in) Traditionally this wouldnt be much of an issue for me, however there were troubles locating certain drivers even from manufacturer's websites (such as the NFC card reader driver). ----This was made worse by the fact that the drivers that were posted on the Asus website were incorrect and I had to go to many different manufacturer's websites to get the correct drivers for multiple aspects of the motherboard -Asus utilities caused BSODs when I was attempting to install Bitdefender 2013 Internet Security. Without the Asus utilities installed the Bitdefender install went without issue

Overall Review: I suppose many of my issues would have been negated if I had originally received a working copy of the drivers DVD, but since I did not, it made the install of many of the aspects of this board somewhat of a pain. Furthermore, even without a functioning copy of the DVD, it shouldnt have been as difficult as they made it to get correct drivers from the Asus website. For certain motherboard features (IE: bluetooth and wireless) they have multiple indistinguishable drivers listed but only some work with this board. Overall I like the board and intend on continuing to use it, but the setup was far more annoying than it should have been.

Pros: The board has everything and for a good price. If it wasn't for the issues I experienced I probably would have given the board a 5

Cons: Where to begin... Bought this board along with Intel i7-4770K along with other parts for new build. Put together build and everything fired up right away. Was very pleased with the new BIOS was having tons of fun tweaking and everything. Got OS installed no problem. Left for an hour and came back. Computer would no longer power on. Hit power switch and fans would spin for 1-2 seconds and shut back down. I spent the next 3 days doing everything to trouble shoot the issue. I am serious geek and have fixed hundreds of computer issues built the last 6 of my computers but I could not solve this problem. I tried new power supply, tried pulling memory out, tried doing usb bios flash. Google searching for HOURS trying every fix I could possibly do. No Luck. Sent back MB and CPU RMA to NewEgg. Great service had replacements in less then week. Installed new board and cpu. Everything fired up fine. Just as a hunch I decided to put the computer into sleep mode. Should never have done that. Same issue came back with new board, CPU, and power supply by putting computer in sleep mode. Some more details. Computer will stay on if I unplug CPU 12v power plug or pull CPU other wise shuts off in 1 second. Googling returns many results with people having same systems with same setup with no fixes for the issue. Both power supplies I have tried are supposed to be compatible with Haswell CPU. New Haswell chips have a super low power sleep mode you can google it. I believe this has something to do with the issue. In my opinion there is a serious compatibility issue between this board and the Haswell chips sleep mode. I love Asus products, this is the first issue I have every had with over a dozen Asus products I have owned. This will not stop me from purchasing Asus products in the future. The only negative for Asus is the issue with board and that tech support was useless. I went through the details of my issue and only resolution they could give me was to RMA for second time. I told the tech that I would bet $1000 I could get 12 more boards and 12 more CPU and reproduce the issue 100% of the time. He had no answer for that. I asked for escalation of the issue. To resolve the issue I am now going to RMA second motherboard, second CPU and my PSU and go with different board. Really bummed as I have been waiting to get a working computer for almost three weeks now. I would really like to discuss this with someone from Asus that can take this issue to the next level. I truly believe that there is a serious problem here.

Overall Review: Disable sleep mode!!

Pros: AC wireless Dual thunderbolt ports Easy to navigate BIOS Easy to overclock Lots of SATA 6 Gbps ports

Cons: Could use a 1394 header (I know rare on today's boards) Could use a few more usb 2.0 and maybe 3.0 headers AI Suite/possibly just wifi-GO caused computer to start up itself

Overall Review: So for my first build I was going to go with the Maximus extreme VI board but after hearing some not so great things about it I decided on this board. I've only owned this for a little over a week so far but so far I'm really liking it. It has more features than you can shake a stick at even for the olympic stick shakers. I love the built in ac wireless as well as the bluetooth, it has plenty of connectivity with usb 2.0 and 3.0, dual gigabit Ethernet, as well as the two built in thunderbolt ports. My only complaints for connectivity go to the internal connectors. While it has 10 sata connectors, there are only 2 usb 2.0 headers, one usb 3.0 header and zero 1394 headers. This may work fine for you but I had used up both usb 2 headers for the case usb and had to use in internal usb hub for my corsair link modules. I only needed the 1394 header for my case but I don't know I like to have everything working on my case. All in all its my fault in the first place for not realizing it. The bios on this board is relatively easy to navigate and through it I have overclocked my 4770k to 4.3ghz stable just running some auto/adaptive settings while also running 2400mhz corsair dominator platinums after enabling X.M.P. The only problem I had besides the ports was I had my computer randomly just turning itself on and awaking from sleep. I narrowed it down to the AI Suite III software and potentially wifi-GO software within AI Suite. Once I uninstalled AI Suite I no longer have any of these problems and the board is running great. I have yet to use the NFC device for anything besides a usb hub but that was more of a bonus anyway, I bought this over the deluxe for the thunderbolt ports. Would I buy this board again? Yes definitely

Pros: Looks good - can't wait to get a revised board. Asus responded quickly with an answer to my question.

Cons: After recieving the board, I checked with asus support to see if the serial # indicated that the board was produced after the Intel usb3.0 stepping correction. Unfortunately it isn't. PCN112101-01 pdf is about the change and applies to all m-boards using this chip. Now I am going to have to return it, if it cannot be RMA'd and wait until I know that I can a purchase a motherboard with the updated revisions. Hopefully, newegg will post the revision on site when it is available.

Pros: Thunderbolt ports.

Cons: Possible chipset bug

Overall Review: I heard that there was a chipset bug in the first wave of Z87 boards. How would one know whether or not that issue has been addressed with this board?

Pros: The motherboard works well for what i have seen so far. This runs at 4.5 Ghz stable on my 4770K any higher is a no go on my Prolimatech Megahalems Air Cooler. I'm glad my driver cd did work with minor issues. This seems to be a great deal better than my Nehalem P6X58D Premium Motherboard. As for features sure you got Thunderbolt and NFC Express may come in handy. Wifi i may use ,but probably later.

Cons: The drivers on the Asus Website for the DIP4 are corrupt. Some reason data2.cab is missing and that needs fixed. Also for some reason the UEFI looked better on my previous version before flashing the new one on the website.

Overall Review: Once everything is fixed this will be a monster motherboard. I also plan to get 32 gigabytes worth of memory and put this to the test.

Pros: Numerous options to choose from. Error codes display directly on the motherboard if you need to refer to the manual to look up any issues. Intuitive BIOS for endless configurations. Slapped everything together and booted on first try with my Intel 4770K and G.Skill 1866x32GB. This board and my 4770K handle 3 VMs running on Win 7 64bit, Apache 2.2, 5.1 audio, my mail server, RAID 5, and a busy FTP site 24 hours a day with ease.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: Spend a little time reading the BIOS section of the manual. It has a ton of features and throw away your 1394 cables.

Pros: Has everything you would ever want in a motherboard.

Cons: 2 of the memory lanes didn't work, we've tried 3 different memory brands with different frequencies all approved by Asus's QVL but none of them worked, we also tried different power supplies and different cpus too still no use as soon as we installed the other two modules we got 0055 error code.

Overall Review: We bought three of these for our office use one had a problem with usb 3 and the other had the memory lanes problem we didn't notice the second one from the start because we only needed 8gb of Ram at the beginning but when we decided to increase the ram we faced this annoying problem, Worst part about this situation is that we don't know if it's been 3 years already or not since the Asus support website doesn't show how long you have left on your warranty, I've been using Asus motherboards since 2006 so this was a complete let down.