Ports and Features:
When you first take a look at the Hi-Fi Z97WE, it looks very similar to many of the other enthusiast boards on the market. All of the typical details you see on most boards are included, right down to the stylish heatsinks around the chipset. Although this may not be the most eye grabbing board in terms of looks, the Hi-Fi Z97WE’s layout is designed very sensibly, with evenly distributed fan headers and well arranged slots and ports.
After Taking a closer look at the area around the socket, we noticed that the DIMM slots are a little bit closer to the socket then we would like them to be. This isn’t that big of an issue for most of the coolers that would be used, but could be trouble for some of the after market coolers that may fall outside of the restricted area outlined around the socket.
Nothing really stands out when looking at the I/O cluster, other than the dual GbE LAN which was previously mentioned in this review. It was a surprise to see Biostar included an S/PDIF Out port which isn’t common on boards at this price range. Now that we have spent some time going over the layout and ports, let’s move on to overclocking and the UEFI.
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