Asus Z97-A puts Intel's 9 Series chipset through its paces Here we are again. Another Intel chipset series sees the light of day – but at least this time there isn’t a new socket to contend with... Well, at the very high end there is, but that’s for the X99 Express coming later. Intel 9 Series chipset overview At launch there are two 9 series chipsets: the Z97 Express and the H97 …
UEFI has been standard on most boards for a few years now.
Are you talking about UEFI or Secure Boot? Two sparate things.
I was dual booting OS X, Linux and Windows on my UEFI Mac without any problems. Most Linux distros have had UEFI support for a few years now.
These days only Windows XP users would probably have problems with UEFI.
To Microsoft, UEFI and Secure Boot may as well be the same thing.
"Windows 8 introduces a new requirement for PC manufacturers (OEMs) that may require modifications to your OS deployment infrastructure. That requirement ensures that all Windows 8 systems are shipped with their BIOS in UEFI Mode and Secure Boot enabled."
My solution: Don't buy Windows.
Source: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-client/w/wiki/4151.uefi-and-secure-boot/rss.aspx
I only use a heat pipe and fan CPU heatsink when the bundled one for a low power CPU which is hardly stressed e.g. a FreeNAS box, with a much cheaper AMD CPU.
My main PC uses a pre-assembled water cooler with push-pull fans on the radiator and stays much cooler and quieter that the old huge heat pipe cooler I had, and for about the same price!
I won't touch Intel for anything but my main PC, because the CPUs and motherboards are so damned expensive, so it only makes sense for stuff which needs the best processing power.
"… well, apart from the first memory slot being blocked by a fan, but that’s a given with third party coolers, in general"
Its been a while since I've looked at air coolers for a CPU but is it really common now that they block memory slots? Seems you either chose poorly on a fan or mobo or both.
Last PC I built I had to remove the aluminum RAM heat shields to get them to fit under my cooler. The cooler block pipes rubbed against the shield otherwise. I'll bet the cooler manufacturers design to the DDR specs and don't take the shields into account.
Shows how close the tolerances are in those designs where an extra mm in height causes issues.
"Its been a while since I've looked at air coolers for a CPU but is it really common now that they block memory slots? Seems you either chose poorly on a fan or mobo or both."
A lot of the "high performance" coolers will obstruct the first memory slot (which on Z87/97 is going to be in the second bank to be used, so likely only a problem if you're going with 4 sticks of RAM). There are a sufficient number of "thin" coolers which won't overhang the first slot (e.g. Noctua NH-U12S), together with some of the larger ones which get over the problem simply by having a bigger gap between the CPU and the bottom of the cooling fin array - both of these tend to be tall. The reason why the Noctua NH-U9B overhangs is it's not supposed to be that tall.
Intel's specs basically dictate where the DIMM banks can go, too.
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