BIOSTAR Announces the GAMING Z97X and Z97W Motherboards

BIOSTAR has announced their latest flagship socket LGA1150 motherboard, the GAMING Z97X. The Z97X is designed with gamers in mind and is built with a high amount of connectivity and a little bit of overclocking rather than just being focused on the best overclocking potential.

The brown-gold and black colour scheme along with the plastic shroud at the rear give the board a unique appearance. The CPU gets its power from a 12-phase VRM and the board has three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and three PCI-Express 2.0 x1 expansion slots wired to the PCH.

Storage connectivity includes SATA-Express, six SATA 6 Gb/s, and an M.2 (PCIe 2.0 x2) connector. The board also offers two supercharged USB 3.1 (10 Gb/s) ports, in addition to six normal USB 3.0 ports, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. As mentioned, this board is focused on connectivity and further has two gigabit Ethernet interfaces that sadly won’t allow for bridging as one is driven by an Intel controller and the other by a Qualcomm Killer E2200; those are still two great choices to have.

The onboard audio features a 110 dBA SNR CODEC, a 600Ω headphones amp, and ground-layer isolation and comes bundled with a 5.25-inch front-panel head-unit BIOSTAR calls the Gaming Commander. It doesn’t just provide front-panel audio outputs and control, but also diagnostic LEDs and temperature indicator.

The GAMING Z97W was released at the same time and is a slightly slimmed down version without the third PCIe x16 slot and with a 10-phase CPU VRM.

 Thanks to TechPowerU  for providing us with this information