Closer Look
The Biostar Hi-Fi Z97Z7 heavily borrows from the ASUS Z97-DELUXE, intentional or not, the similarity is striking. Focusing more on the one we have right here, the Biostar Hi-Fi Z97Z7 features a high-contrast color scheme of a bronze gold highlight going over the primarily glossy dark PCB. The PCB isn’t fully black, its a dark-brown color as you can see in the close ups. The large circular PCH HSF isn’t as stand-out as the ones in the DELUXE, but the shape is still very uncommon.
Biostar isn’t really going all out in terms of connectivities here with the rear I/O consisting of the common USB3.0, video outputs, audio output and such we’ve grown accustomed to in the stock Z97 offerings.
A single SATA EXpress interface is present together with 2 more pairs of SATA III ports, Â a total of six SATAIII ports.
BIOSTAR isn’t known for their lavish heatsinks but these new ones are looking really good while they cool the 8-phase CPU VRM on the Hi-FI Z97Z7.
In terms of expansion, the BIOSTAR Z97Z7 is a bit basic and only offers two PCI-E x16 slots for a maximum of dual-GPU setups. Legacy PCI slots also fill up the lower parts of the board. A Debug code LED display is just beneath the PCH.
BIOSTAR still employes the same technique the used over the years for their Hi-Fi series, using their choice of “Non-Polarized Electrolysis Electric audio capacitors” to augment the rather older ALC892 audio codec.
Integrated onboard buttons for easier maintenance and troubleshooting.
Another shot of that upper corner and we see a toggle swich which is actually an LN2 switch which throttles down the CPU for extreme OC sessions.
An M.2 slot is present just above the first PCI-E x16 slot for NGFF devices.
1 Comment
Biostar Z97X Gaming please :3