Computex 2014, Asia’s largest high-tech event, will run from June 3rd to the 7th this year in Taipei, Taiwan and BIOSTAR will showcase three product families featuring the latest Embedded, PC Mainboard and Graphics Card solutions including Intel’s recent released “Haswell Refresh” processors and 9 Series chipsets in the Nangang Exhibition Hall at Booth L0128.
One specific mainboard that BIOSTAR will be showing is the Hi-Fi Z97WE, based on the Intel Z97 chipset with key features such as PCIe M.2 support, Dual GbE LAN and BIOSTAR exclusive Hi-Fi audio technology.
The Hi-Fi Z97WE comes with many BIOSTAR in-house features like Hi-Fi audio technology. It is an ATX form factor board that features Intel socket 1150 support. It has 4 memory slots for up to 32GB of RAM. The on-board LAN controller also supports 10/100/1000/2000 with “Teaming” mode. The on-board HDMI supports 4K and 2K resolutions.
It includes the usual high-end motherboard features like USB 3.0, HDMI and PCI-E slots, including the newest PCIe development, the M.2 form factor. The M.2 standard is the newest and smallest form factor implementation of the SATA Express interface (which provides support for PCI Express 3.0 and Serial ATA 3.0), with the addition of an internal USB 3.0 interface.
It supports multiple functions for add-in cards, including the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite navigation, near field communication (NFC), digital radio, Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), wireless WAN (WWAN), and solid-state drives (SSDs).
But being a BIOSTAR board, there is a premium set of features including the company’s new “Hi-Fi” technology. All the BIOSTAR Hi-Fi series motherboards are equipped with special components to ensure the best possible audio quality consistency.
The Hi-Fi Z97WE also features BIOSTAR’s dual Gigabit LAN card functionality that takes networking and gaming to new levels. To achieve this, the Hi-Fi Z97WE has dual Gigabit LAN connections on the board that allow simultaneous LAN connections. The primary advantage is the doubling of bandwidth which allows the network bandwidth of 1G to become that of 2G. It also allows for Full-duplex transmission.
Two network cards can be simultaneously transmitted to upload and download at the same time. In addition, there is zero packet delay with two high-speed gigabit networks, giving super high data transmission efficiency. Another major advantage is that of Load Balancing. This allows the user to attach both network adapters to a single network. This can allow for double the network bandwidth of a single connection under certain circumstances. It will therefore support the aggregation “teaming” function by merging the two connections to support multiple aggregation modes.
In addition, with BIOSTAR’s dual Gigabit LAN connections you get network insurance. These boards come with two Gigabit Ethernet lightning protection circuits, there are cross-efficient in reducing the probability of damage from lightning or other power surge. So if one connection is disabled the other connection will automatically kick in.
Lastly, being based on the Intel Haswell chipset, the Hi-Fi Z97WE also comes with Intel SRT (Smart Response Technology), Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology), Intel Rapid Start Technology and Intel Smart Connect Technology all built into the system, ready to go.
