The official Intel Z97 chipset launch day is finally here but it's hardly been a surprising arrival. There have been leaks left, right and centre so most of today's revelations probably won't come as a surprise to most of our readers. However, this article (as the title suggests) is about the ASUS Z97 launch. ASUS went to great lengths in April to communicate with the global media about what is actually new with their Z97 motherboards. Making people aware of the ?new? is important because as some of you may know, the new Haswell Refresh CPUs are not yet ready, we don't have DDR4 support and the Z97 chipset doesn't really bring anything new. In fact the Z97 chipset still has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, six SATA III and six USB 3.0 ports just like Z87. Don't let that fool you though, Z97 does bring some new features to the table even if many of these features will be vendor specific. A couple of the more important features that Z97 is pushing are storage related ? SATA Express support and PCIe M.2 support. Most vendors will vigorously taking advantage of these and ASUS are certainly no exception.