Last year when Intel introduced the Haswell platform, centered on the 8-series chipsets, the platform was an impressive step forward for connectivity and more storage options were integrated at almost every level. It also signaled the end of an era. Intel specified that the boards they had built for Haswell with the B85, H87 and Z87 chipsets were the last PC motherboards they'd be making and selling.
Just a few weeks ago, Intel officially released the next platform, built around the 9-series chipsets and referred to as Haswell's mid-life kicker or refresh. (The next extreme desktop platform, X99, is to be called Haswell, bringing a neat synchronicity to the desktop and high-end desktop platforms that doesn't often exist.) As a result of this, the top motherboard manufacturers have all released their new products.
But first, a moment of silence for our dear, and now (probably) deceased Intel DZ87KLT-75K. This board, although really slightly above my station in terms of overclocking capabilities, had everything I could have wanted onboard, including Thunderbolt, six SATA ports, an mSATA connector, FireWire 400, more USB 3.0 ports than average, and skulls. This board may still be available, but it's unlikely to receive the firmware update to run the new Devil's Canyon (Haswell Refresh) processors, such as the 4.0GHz base i7-4790K CPU, which is appealing to me because of all of that performance at stock speeds.
Z97 is interesting because it adds a focus on some faster storage technologies, namely SATA Express and M.2, but it does so at the expense of any semblance of sanity and simplicity. The way that SATA Express and M.2 work is by directing PCI Express lanes at storage, and connecting SSDs directly to the PCI Express bus, which is neat because it increases the performance of solid state storage, and unfortunate because it reduces the number of ports available for regular SATA storage. In a Z87 setup, my inclination was to achieve fast SSD storage either by putting two regular SSDs in RAID 0 or installing an SSD on a PCIe card.
Not all Z97 boards actually have both SATA Express and M.2 or even either of them, which makes the playing field even weirder. Unfortunately, it's likely to be impossible to find a Z97 board with Thunderbolt, Firewire, and the particular combination of storage options I want. I suppose this is why there are PCI and PCI Express cards, but the DZ87KLT-75K was that rare combination of exactly what I wanted at a pretty good price. There is at least one board that looks nice so far, which is neat. Although let's be honest, with so many motherboard vendors out there, and with many of them doing things like launching twenty six H97 and Z97 boards, there's a whole deluge of things to look at. This is admittedly one of the reasons when Haswell and the 8-series launched, I almost immediately started looking exclusively at Intel's products. Intel launched a grand total of five 8-series boards, all of which had really obvious value propositions and markets.
The other main improvements on Z97 are largely incremental, and even though SATA Express (in particular) media suffers from an existence failure at the moment, I do think it's an important evolution. As we've seen in notebook computers, Macs, and the Mac Pro, bypassing Intel's storage controller and dropping an SSD directly onto the PCI Express bus has been the most efficient method for resolving computing's biggest bottleneck, which for years has been storage.
Unfortunately, Because Z97 supports both M.2 and PCI Express, I suspect that the fast storage market will be fragmented for a few years. It may even get worse before it gets better, as companies continue to market and sell direct PCI Express SSDs for desktop computers. This isn't even counting the 12 gigabit SAS standard that's likely to result in a 12 gigabit SATA spin-off in the near future.
All of this stuff makes for some neat differentiation possibility, but as has been the case since more and more stuff started piling onto motherboards, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find boards that have stuff that's relevant to my individual interests, but doesn't have things that aren't.
I suppose this is one of the draws of something like the Extreme platform, as X79 boards are relatively bare by today's standards, but have all of the PCI Express lanes, so a user that's interested in having loads of USB 3.0 ports, FireWire, and a really fast SSD can add those things in the PCI Express slots of their system. (However, in an ideal world, X99 or Haswell-E will have a whole load of USB 3.0 ports and 6 gigabit SATA ports, as well as Thunderbolt.)
As always, there's something better on the horizon. Haswell was a point at which everything in the band of PC parts was perfect for me, from a physical and appearance perspective, and from a performance and capabilities perspective. I can't imagine that Haswell Refresh is honestly going to be "bad" in any way compared to it, but searching for the perfect board is going to be a challenge.
I don't even have the budget to build a new machine at this particular moment, so I have yet to start reading the Z97 reviews in earnest, because it's unclear if when I do have the budget, Broadwell or a future platform will already have dropped. As a final note, if the budget for a desktop appeared tomorrow, the choice between buying my chosen Z87 board (especially if a firmware update appears for it so it can use the newest processors) and a Z97 board would be challenging.