 This video is brought to you by Cooler Master, featuring the Sidon 240 millimeter all-in-one CPU water cooling system. Check it out at www.coolermaster-usa.com Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS Z87 Deluxe. This is from their channel series of boards where you find models like Pro and Evo and Deluxe and all those kinds of things traditionally. And they have done a lot of things differently with this generation of product on the LGA 1150 platform. So these support the latest fourth generation Intel Core i3 i5 and i7 processors codenamed Haswell. You've got full support for Nvidia SLI AMD Crossfire as well as DTS audio. So that's a license that they definitely did have to pay for. I'm also going to talk a fair bit about the four-way optimizations enabled by their dual intelligent processors generation for technology. On the rest of the outside of the box, you know what? We're not going to worry too much about that. Let's get this thing opened up. So the first thing we see once we get her open is the motherboard itself. And ASUS has gone with a serious departure from their traditional color scheme on these boards, which has been black and blue for quite some time. Now we have a black and yellow and gold color scheme that looks quite striking. So without further ado, let's put that away. Next we're going to get into more adieu, which is all this other stuff in here. So we've got an IO shield, Q connectors for easily connecting your front panel connectors, soft flexible SLI bridge. This is interesting. So you guys are going to like this. This is a wireless AC dual band antenna. And I've actually seen a live demo of this running at in excess of 850 megabit per second, which is very, very cool. Six SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second cables, including three right angle and three straight cables, as well as a user guide with driver disk, which you probably won't need because you're going to download the latest from the ASUS website, round out the accessory package. So not as rich as what you might find on something like an ROG board, but I think that really is expected given that this is a lower tier of product. So I want to clarify something right from the start. This is a channel board. This is not necessarily a gaming oriented board, but that, I mean, it's going to be an ROG board for that, but you're still going to find great performance in gaming, great performance in overclocking and all that stuff. But it means that the features, particularly what ASUS is talking about these boards, are more focused on other things. And that starts right with the power. So you've got your 8-pin CPU power connector up here at the top left in its ideal location. And you've got a nice beefy heat sink arrangement with a heat pipe on the chipset as well as the power delivery system, which is quite beefy as well. Next up, you're going to find this little guy right here. This is an EPU chip, and this is where their dual intelligent processors for really come into play. So it allows you to do a number of really cool things. Through the software, you can control things like fan speed, you can control how much power your system is consuming, you can even set a TDP target. So you can set a power consumption target for your CPU, set it and forget it, and the EPU will automatically go, OK, yeah, we'll make sure that CPU never goes over that power consumption so you can make your system more efficient. You can do a number of other cool things with this, including turning off or on certain USB ports when the system is powered off. Remember, guys, on-off charging has been a feature on motherboards for a couple generations now. But what if you didn't want all the ports powered on while the system isn't turned on? What if you had things like LED lighting as an underglow effect under your case and you wanted it to turn off when your system's not on? Well, now you can actually selectively do that, which is really, really cool. The EPU combined with the TPU also allows you to control performance profiles, with the TPU giving you two different tiers of overclocked performance, one of which is more like a more aggressive turbo boost and the second of which enables XMP and starts overclocking all of the cores concurrently. All of this is enabled by Asus' fully digital power delivery system, as well as some of the other cool things they're doing, like building in only four-pin fan connectors, which is really neat because it allows you to take full control of these fans, which can also be configured as part of that whole system control. So it can control performance, power consumption, as well as cooling, and not only that, but it has a special away mode that's going to be able to reduce your CPU power consumption and detect when you're not at the computer so that it doesn't take as much power, but what it does do is it allows you to still do passive things like download or access files remotely and all that kind of cool stuff. So speaking of four-pin fan connectors, there's a special CPU fan connector that's built into their new generation of boards that automatically detects whether you have a three-pin or a four-pin fan connected so that it can use either analog or PWM control for your CPU fan. You've got full support for four DIMMs of DDR3 running in dual channel, and higher memory speeds are supported. The board supports natively up to DDR3 2800 MHz, which is incredibly cool. The 24-pin connector is in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board, and I like to see this. More four-pins over on the right-hand edge of the board. So many boards hide all of their fan connectors like back here. I'm sitting here going, well, who has all of their fans in the back of their case? Nobody. There's usually like one there. Whereas you often will have a couple fans in the front of the case, and these can reach them easily. Your front USB 3.0 connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge, and you've got 10 SATA 3.6 gigabit per second connectors, six of which are powered by the Intel chipset. You've got hardware buttons built in for your TPU and EPU modes, so that's for your energy efficient processor, the EPU, and your TPU, which has one and two, so it's actually got three positions. So TPU off, TPU one, TPU two, so those are those multiple profiles I talked about before. You've got your USB 2.0 front panel connectors, two LED post readouts, so the potential here is endless. There's all kinds of four-letter words I wouldn't mind putting on my motherboard if given the opportunity, as well as a clear CMOS button allowing you to, well, clear the CMOS. There's built-in power and reset boards, which belong on a high-end board, but are not necessarily, you know, colored, cool, like on the ROG board, and located in a more prominent location, because fewer people are going to be using this in an out-of-case sort of environment. Seven expansion slots total with four PCIe 1x slots and three PCIe 16x slots. However, it should be noted that two of them are going to run in either 16x or 8x, 8x, and one of them runs in 4x. This board supports two-way SLI or up to three-way crossfire with a potentially a performance hit, because that third card is only going to run at PCIe 4x. Now, this brings me to one of the things that I think is coolest about this board. So this Wi-Fi Go guy right here, it has built-in wireless AC, and I just think that is really, really cool, especially with some of the software things that ASUS has done. So they allow you to use your computer as a Wi-Fi hotspot, they allow you to easily take remote control of your computer, and they allow you to use the software as a DLNA server, and it enables easy file transfer. So this is all cool stuff that is important to your mainstream or your channel customer. Also on the back of the board, we find that someone put these stickers on the wrong spots. These stickers are supposed to be up here. Give me a moment. And we're ready to have a look at the rear I.O. So we've got a multitude of display outputs, including mini display port, full-size display port, and HDMI. So we've moved away completely from DVI and VGA. And remember, guys, what's cool about Haswell chips is they do support multi-display outputs, meaning that from a productivity standpoint, so sure, you're not going to be gaming on a surround setup, but from a productivity standpoint, that's really, really cool. We've got six USB 3.0 ports with full support on the ASMedia controller for UASP, which does improve USB 3.0 performance with supported devices. We've got an optical audio out, a USB BIOS flashback button, and I have used this, and it does work. If you brick your board, you can use this to reset it as long as you follow the instructions that you find online. We've got four USB 2.0 ports, and I think the point of this was to say, hey, plug your keyboard and mouse in here, because some USB 3.0 ports still have some compatibility weirdness with some keyboards and mice. There's nothing ASUS can do about it. It's not really their fault. I think it's going to be a long time before we see any motherboards with no USB 2.0, or at least it'll be a long time before we should. We've got an Intel gigabit network controller as well as a different one. Use this one because it supports ASUS's iControl software, which allows you to set network prioritization and cool stuff like that with an AI suite. And last but not least, we've got 7.1 audio out. Now, a lot of the improvements that ASUS has made go beyond the hardware, such as in the UEFI BIOS, and I call it a UEFI BIOS even though I know it's not correct. It's called the UEFI. So they've got a bunch of really cool stuff, including ways that you can segment away sort of your most frequently used settings. They've got the simple mode, much expanded, so it includes some of the more frequently used things where people were just not even bothering to use it because it didn't allow you to do the things you needed to do. They've got full control of every fan in the system now, which is very, very cool, and they actually ran a demo for us showing how quickly the system can actually set itself up to do things like figure out the RPMs of all your fans, figure out the cooling that it all needs, and it'll just self-optimize itself, which is very, very neat. You can also make notes within the BIOS, which is cool. Now, I've always liked features like BIOS profiles because they allow you to kind of, you know, say, oh, well, this is my aggressive overclock. This is my safe one that I know works if that one bugs out or whatever else, but you could never really label them. All I could do was put like four gigahertz stable, and that was all I could really do. Now you can make notes within the BIOS, and it even keeps a log of the last thing you changed. So when you're tweaking and overclocking, you can be like, oh, well, it was working before, and now it's not. What did I actually change? And you can go back and fix it quite easily. The main information is pinned to the bottom, and from the demos that I've seen, I haven't actually fired one of these up for myself yet. It looks much more efficient to navigate, which is really saying something, because it was already quite strong. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Z87 Deluxe from ASUS. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.