Introduction
Contents
The Fatal1ty Z87 Killer is a top mid-range motherboard for socket LGA1150 Intel CPUs. It comes with a high-end audio codec, an Atheros Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet chip (hence the name of the product), three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, six SATA-600 ports, and six USB 3.0 ports. Let’s take a look at it.
The Intel Z87 chipset provides two important upgrades compared to its predecessor, the Z77: six USB 3.0 ports instead of four and six SATA-600 ports instead of only two. Another important difference between the two chipsets is where the video outputs of the motherboard are connected. While with both chipsets the video is generated by the CPU, on the Z77 the video signal was routed to the chipset, and the video outputs were connected to the chipset. On the Z87 chipset, the video outputs are connected directly to the processor. Both chipsets support up to three independent video monitors. The Z87 supports all other features provided by the Z77, such as Smart Response (installing an SSD as a cache for the main hard drive), Smart Connect (allowing the computer to receive emails and refresh webpages while in sleep mode), and Rapid Start (faster boot times) technologies.
You can see the ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer motherboard in Figure 1.
Figure 1: ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer motherboard
