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ASUS Z87-PRO upgrade now to Z97 or not?

C

Compman55

Golden Member
When I built my system in april of 2014 Z97 was not released, so I picked a Z-87 pro as it would support the Xeon E3-1245v3 CPU.

With july 29th being the deadline for W10, would there be any advantages to upgrading to this Z97 to get more life out of the Xeon?
 
Not really.. Z97 has SATA Express, and M.2 capabilities, other than that, it's identical to the Z87 chipset.
 
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Upgrading a motherboard is rarely worth it. There's some decent new features on the Z97 but nothing that can't wait until your next full platform upgrade.
 
Don't bother, unless you get a crazy deal.

The Z97 *would* be worth it if the M.2 slot supported faster drives, but it's bandwidth limited.

The Z97/H97 chipset supports M.2 drives using PCI-e 2.0 with only 2 lanes for 10Gbps of bandwidth, which severely limits new NVMe drives. The Z170 chipset has an M.2 slot that uses PCI-e 3.0 with 4 lanes - up to 32 Gbps (triple the bandwidth).
 
save your $$ for a Z170 rig 🙂

I found out the hard way last year that Z87 & 97 boards are essentially the same except for the differences listed already, and those dont really amount to much of a difference performance-wise...
 
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