It had been expected that the Z87 chipset would see the Haswell range out, but this June delivered a Haswell refresh and along with some rebadged CPUs we got the new 9-series chipset and a successor to the Z87. Codenamed ‘Wildcat Point’, the new Z97 was virtually identical to its predecessor with a few exceptions. The most noteworthy change was support for future Broadwell CPUs, which should arrive during the coming holiday shopping period. In addition to compatibility with future processors, the Z97 brought SATA Express as well as the M.2 socket (briefly known as NGFF or the next generation form factor after mSATA). M.2 is a specification for internally mounted storage and add-in cards. First designed for mobile devices, the M.2 interface has found its way into desktops and the new Z97 and H97 chipsets have played a big role in speeding up its adoption as a replacement for mSATA, which uses the PCI Express Mini Card physical layout.
Having a smaller and more flexible specification together with more advanced features, the M.2 is better suited for solid-state storage applications in general, especially when used in small devices like ultrabooks or tablets. SATA Express is less promising in our opinion as it doesn’t currently have supporting SSD devices. Whereas the M.2 socket is typically shared with one SATA 6Gb/s port, the SATA Express interface takes two SATA 6Gb/s ports and requires a third smaller port which deals with PCI-Express based communications. With over 90 motherboards available right now using the Z97 chipset, picking the right one can be a difficult decision. Hoping to narrow the search down, we have taken seven popular boards and compared them in just about every way possible. We’ve included a total of seven boards from Asus, Asrock, EVGA Gigabyte and MSI in this roundup. Check out the comparisson table below for a quick glance at the features offered by each or skip to the respective page for a more detailed rundown.
