Biostar has announced its highest-end Z97 motherboard – the Hi-Fi Z97WE. This motherboard is a fairly standard ATX board with the new Z97 chipset, though it does come with improved onboard audio hardware and one additional Ethernet port.
The board has support for the existing Haswell processors as well as the new Haswell refresh processors. The LGA1150 socket draws power from an 8-pin EPS power connector which feeds a 10-phase VRM circuit. There are also four DDR3 memory slots. PCI-Express expansion is made possible with two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and two PCIe x1 slots along with two legacy PCI slots. SATA connectivity is present for six SATA3 (6 Gb/s) devices along with a single M.2 slot. It looks like there is no SATA-Express connector.
Rear I/O connectivity is handled by two USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a legacy PS/2 port, HDMI, VGA and DVI, along with 8-channel analog audio accompanied by an optical TOSLINK output. On board there is a single USB 3.0 header.
The audio connectors are driven by improved audio hardware that is named “PURO Audio,” and as part of the package users will find better capacitors along with a headphone amplifier, all on a separated part of the PCB.
No word on availability, though pricing for the motherboard is expected to be around $150.
