Four Z87 Express Motherboards Under $300, Reviewed

We’re almost amazed every time Intel unveils another revamped core architecture, when its best-performing technology ends up packaged for mainstream desktop, mobile, and server customers. The company's ability to simultaneously touch so many segments with one launch makes its strategy pretty tough to knock. But it also means that fans of the latest and greatest (particularly on the desktop) top out at four cores, while enthusiasts eager to gobble up the most complex processors have to wait for the enterprise-derived Extreme parts to catch up. Because a lot of the games we play stop scaling around four cores, that's usually fine for most folks.

Also fine (most of the time) is an integrated PCI Express 3.0 controller, which enjoys very low latency. The biggest bummer for gamers is that Intel's mainstream platforms only expose 16 lanes. With the Haswell generation, you can connect as many as three cards to the CPU-based PCIe, but the requisite lane division isn't particularly attractive. That capability probably appeals most on high-end office PCs or entry-level workstations.

Sixteen lanes sound like a big bottleneck for systems packing multiple graphics cards, but there's more to the story. Since each card in a multi-GPU array uses the same data, a PCIe bridge able to map 16 lanes to three or four x16 slots works well. But that component is costly, and its expense divides the premium Z87 Express motherboard market into two segments: boards that support three-way SLI and those armed with almost everything except three-way SLI. Since most of us are happy with one or two super-fast cards fed by an equally potent processor, we're staying under that $300 barrier today, focusing on the premium features we can get without worrying about a PCIe bridge and putting more of our efforts into overclocking.