Asus Z97i-Plus Review

Performance Analysis

Stock speed results vary little across the board; in fact there's barely 100 points difference between the top spot, occupied by the Maximus VI Impact (we included this to show the best result from our Z87 testing) and the slowest board, which was the Asus Maximus VII Ranger. If you're massively picky here, the Z97i-Plus didn't perform particularly well, but the difference isn't really worth worrying about.

The same was true in our game tests, where both the CPU-specific Shogun 2: Total War CPU Test and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim saw the Z97i-Plus perform similarly to other boards on test. Once overclocked, the Media Benchmark scores were more potent compared to the rest of the field, with an overall score of 2,920 enough for a top five result.


The best result was in the M.2 test, where in ATTO Disk Benchmark it managed the best read and write speeds we've seen of 764MB/sec and 570MB/sec respectively - a few megabytes a second quicker than the select few other M.2-equipped Z97 boards we've tested.

Audio performance was average compared to the best results on test, but with a fairly standard on-board audio codec this isn't surprising and it performed similarly to other Realtek ALC892 and ALC1150-based motherboards as well as being rated as 'Good' in the test's HTML output fle. The exceptions here are Asus's own Maximus VII Formula and Gigabyte's GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 in particular being way out in front.

Power consumption, meanwhile, was right on the money for a mini-ITX motherboard, and the Z97i-Plus used a noticeable amount less than the Gigabyte GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 once overclocked too.

Conclusion

There's a lot to like here with the Z97i-Plus; it has M.2 - something many of its rivals lack, plus sports 802.11ac WiFi and an antenna in the box. It has plenty of overclocking potential and the removal of the large VRM daughterboard has most likely resulted in the very reasonable price tag and will mean less restriction when it comes to CPU cooler choice too.

The only real downside is the average on-board audio; Gigabyte really nailed it with the GA-Z97N-Gaming 5, and the Maximus VII Impact will likely perform well here too. If this is an issue then you could consider an external USB sound card if you'll be filling the 16x PCI-E slot with a graphics card as you could use alternatively use it for a sound card if yours will be a non-gaming system. Apart from this, the Z97i-Plus ticks every other box and scores highly in terms of value too.