Black, white/silver, and yellow/gold are the latest ASUS Z87 series color schemes. For a while, blue colors were used by previous generations. The ASUS Z87 Deluxe/Dual has a conventional ATX form factor and a host of high-quality parts.

ASUS' power supply components include massive heatsinks, which can be seen in the socket area of the CPU. ASUS obviously intends for this motherboard to be used with huge heatsinks that can offer practically quiet cooling, even though Haswell CPUs perform fine with the default Intel heatsink/fan. A PCIe x1 slot is used as the top slot and a flat heat pipe/heatsink that does not interfere with most PCIe x1 cards is used as the heatsink. The ASUS Z87 Deluxe/Dual was a breeze to use with both air coolers and today's water coolers because of these design features.

ASUS uses an optimized slot layout for cooling after the first PCIe x1 slot. Two PCIe x1 slots follow the first PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. Single, dual, and triple-slot GPU coolers may all be handled in this space. When it comes to overclocking, the latter may sometimes give either greater headroom or a lower level of noise. The 5th and 7th PCIe slots are likewise x16 physical slots, whereas the 6th is a PCIe x1 slot. Depending on the number of occupied slots, the three PCIe x16 slots may be utilized in x16/0/0, x8/x8/0, or x8/x4/x4 mode. This is a pretty common occurrence on Z87-based systems.

ASUS has added some useful features to its PCIe slot lineup. Physical power and reset buttons are the first things we have to deal with. The CMOS button is clearly marked with a small red button. In an industry where many manufacturers require their customers to use screwdrivers to bridge gaps in order to clear the CMOS, this is a very useful feature. Diagnostic LEDs are also available from ASUS, which can be helpful when troubleshooting.

As an added bonus, ASUS equipped the motherboard with a lot of internal SATA ports. The motherboard has a total of ten of them. The Intel chipset provides six SATA III 6.0gbps ports. An ASMedia ASM1061 controller supplies power to the remaining four USB ports.. With the controller in AHCI mode, newer operating systems such as FreeBSD 8.2 and 9-current and newer Linux kernels are fairly compatible with this controller. One or two SSDs, one or two HDDs, and one or two optical drives are the most common storage configurations. Having a motherboard that allows for a wide range of upgrade options is a significant benefit of this motherboard.

ASUS had a problem, as can be seen from the rear I/O panel. The size of I/O panels is limited. That standard I/O panel is jam-packed with components due to the abundance of onboard connectivity. There are a total of the following:

However, there are a few important factors to keep in mind. For the first time, there are more USB 3.0 ports than USB 2.0 ports. This is a nice trend, and ASUS provides an internal USB 3.0 header for extra connections on the front panel.

The twin Intel NIC solution ASUS previously utilized for wired networking would have been preferable in this type of motherboard, however, the Realtek NIC will function in many cases and can be activated with default Windows 8 drivers during installation. Since offices and flats tend to have larger densities of people than most other types of buildings, dual-band WiFi is more expensive to deploy. In order to communicate with smartphones and newer wearable gadgets, Bluetooth 4.0 is essential. In general, this is a nice addition to a workstation motherboard since it eliminates the need for a subsequent search for add-on devices by adding additional WiFi and Bluetooth choices onboard.