Febru­ary 9th, 2015, Tai­pei, Tai­wan – BIOSTAR has laun­ched the latest high-end gam­ing board, the Gam­ing Z97X, a board with the new Gam­ing Com­man­der Box acces­so­ry as well as cut­ting-edge fea­tures like USB 3.1 on-board and inno­va­ti­ve dura­bi­li­ty enhancements.

The Gam­ing Z97X ushers in a brand new series of gam­ing hard­ware from BIOSTAR, the first com­ple­te gam­ing mother­board desi­gned by BIOSTAR. This is some­thing new from BIOSTAR, becau­se it’s not just a regu­lar gam­ing mother­board that satis­fies a typi­cal gamers’ needs by just mere­ly offe­ring top of the line hard­ware, rather it is desi­gned from the ground up to be cool loo­king and high per­forming. Let’s talk about what makes the BIOSTAR “Gam­ing Z97X” so special.

The Gam­ing Z97X is an ATX form fac­tor board that fea­tures Intel socket 1150 sup­port and is based on the Intel Z97 chip­set, coming with key fea­tures such as USB 3.1, three PCI Express 3.0x16 slots, PCIe M.2 sup­port, Dual GbE LAN and BIOSTAR exclu­si­ve Super Hi-Fi Audio tech­no­lo­gy and sup­port for Dis­play­Po­rt. Two on-board HDMI sup­ports 4K and 2K reso­lu­ti­ons. The­re is also the intro­duc­tion of the SATA Express Con­nec­tor which sup­ports both SATA and PCIe sto­rage solu­ti­ons giving maxi­mum data trans­fer speed of up to 10Gb/s.

This board also heralds the launch of the BIOSTAR exter­nal Gam­ing Com­man­der box. It fits in a stan­dard 5.5″ (CD-ROM) area; it is also com­pri­sed of soft­ware with voice con­trol cen­ter exclu­si­ve­ly desi­gned by BIOSTAR. The exter­nal box fea­tures an inde­pen­dent USB DAC, dedi­ca­ted MIC_IN and Line-out jacks, but­tons for volu­me adjus­t­ments, a dia­gno­se LED for CPU/ DDR/ VGA tem­pe­ra­tu­re indi­ca­tors, and exclu­si­ve XLou­der but­ton for quick MIC boost. The Gam­ing Com­man­der soft­ware is a user fri­end­ly inter­face with equa­li­zer func­tions which allows users to make their own voice effects while enjoy­ing games.

As men­tio­ned befo­re, it should be noted that the Gam­ing Z97X is the first mother­board that comes with an onboard USB 3.1 con­nec­tor, a new stan­dard known as Super­Speed +. The new stan­dard dou­bles data trans­fer rate from 5Gbps to 10Gbps, and it’s back­ward com­pa­ti­ble with exis­ting USB3.0 con­nec­tors and all the USB 2.0 devices.

The On-board PCIe M.2 slot, available for hig­her per­for­mance SSD; and SATA Express ports that sup­ports both SATA and PCIe sto­rage solu­ti­ons to maxi­mum data trans­fer speed up to 10Gb/s. Both fea­tures can upgrade your sys­tem per­for­mance in terms of data access and storage.

Most of the fea­tures we’ve just tal­ked about are rela­ted to sys­tem hard­ware per­for­mance, now let’s look at the audio per­for­mance. The Gam­ing Z97X adopts BIOSTAR’s exclu­si­ve Hi-Fi 3D tech­no­lo­gy, it enables high defi­ni­ti­on mul­ti­di­men­sio­nal sound and gamers also get extre­me­ly high qua­li­ty sound with an addi­tio­nal ampli­fier on-board. With the Gam­ing Com­man­der BOX, you can free­ly use eit­her sound chips from mother­board or the BOX in dif­fe­rent sce­na­ri­os to get the maxi­mum sound performance.

One thing no gamer can stand is a sud­den inter­net dis­con­nec­tion, so BIOSTAR has pre­pared two LAN con­nec­tors, with the most popu­lar Kil­ler LAN and Intel LAN chips. With Dual GbE LAN, the pri­ma­ry advan­ta­ge is doubling band­width from 1G to 2G, and with two high-speed giga­bit net­works plus zero packet delay that pro­vi­des super high data trans­mis­si­on effi­ci­en­cy. Ano­ther major advan­ta­ge is “Load Balan­cing”, it allows a gamer to attach both net­work adap­ters to a sin­gle net­work. It will the­r­e­fo­re sup­port the aggre­ga­ti­on “team­ing” func­tion by mer­ging the two con­nec­tions to sup­port mul­ti­ple aggre­ga­ti­on modes. In addi­ti­on, two Giga­bit Ether­net light­ning pro­tec­tion cir­cuits redu­ce the pro­ba­bi­li­ty of dama­ge from light­ning or other power sur­ge, so if one con­nec­tion is dis­ab­led the other con­nec­tion will auto­ma­ti­cal­ly kick in.

We’­ve tal­ked about high-end hard­ware specs, the high qua­li­ty sound and the high speed LAN con­nec­tion, what about pro­duct sta­bi­li­ty? BIOSTAR has that cover­ed. Around the CPU area, the­re is a 12 pha­se power design to pre­vent the CPU from over­hea­ting; BIOSTAR’s exclu­si­ve super-dura­ble fer­ri­te cho­kes and solid capa­ci­tors also enhan­ce ener­gy effi­ci­en­cy and extend the motherboard’s life­span. An Anti-Sur­ge and ESD design also pro­vi­des the best pro­tec­tion and redu­ces the shocks cau­sed by ESD as well as other dama­ges ari­sing from over­vol­ta­ge tran­si­ents thus enhan­cing sys­tem sta­bi­li­ty and durability.

The Gam­ing Z97X will come with super dura­ble box hea­ders pro­vi­ding solid, secu­re and dura­ble con­nec­tions bet­ween the mother­board and peri­phe­ral cables. When run­ning such high-end machi­nery some­ti­mes such tight tole­ran­ces call for some expert debug­ging of over­clo­cked or high­ly stres­sed sys­tems. For that, the­re will be Super Rapid Debug 3 which gives out cri­ti­cal POST code infor­ma­ti­on on a vivid digi­tal LED dis­play. This great­ly helps trou­ble shoo­ting of a system.

And of cour­se, it all looks cool and sharp with the armor design; the­re are a lot more gre­at fea­tures like the LN2 switch, T‑Overclocking soft­ware & an onboard XMP but­ton for easy CPU and memo­ry over­clo­cking, and dual HDMI ports that sup­port true 4k/2k HD video. We hope you can expe­ri­ence it yourself.

For more on the Gam­ing Z97X go to: http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=784