ASUS Z87-A

Zitat: Best Award Excellent performance and a wide range of ports and expansion slots make this a great Intel board for Haswell processors

Zitat: It seems that cutting costs can lead to a small disadvantage when it comes to overclocking Haswell CPUs. That´s certainly true with the Z87-A, albeit only by 100MHz, but the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming costs just £5 more and managed to get to 4.7GHz with relative ease. Apart from this there´s also the matter of poor results in our benchmarks. None were significantly worse but the Z87-G45 Gaming was noticeably faster. Other than this there´s very little between the two motherboards. The MSI board has a couple of extra features such as a CMOS clear switch and mSATA port and it has more pizazz in the looks department too. That´s not to say the Z87-A is a bad motherboard - it´s noticeably cheaper than anything that performs significantly better, has a good layout and packs all of Asus´ useful software. Overall we´d opt for the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming, though, despite the Z87-A´s low price tag; it´s faster, features an excellent EFI and has potential for higher overclocks.