Layout

The main color scheme of this board is black and red, whereas the PCB is kept in matte black and the PCIe x16 expansion slots as well as two DIMM slots and some parts of the heatsinks are red. The design shows that Supermicro has it's roots in the server market. In other words we would like this feature for example larger heatsinks and maybe a shroud cover the back I/O ports. This would help improving the looks significantly. The layout in general is ver well thought. The mention our two usual points: there are angled SATA ports, which means you can install extra long graphics cards without having them collide with SATA cables. Apart from that there is plenty of space around the CPU socket, so you can install even today's largest CPU cooler.

The Supermicro C7Z170-SQ comes with a digital 6+3+1+1 phase power design. The CPU receives six full phases, the iGPU can rely on three full phases and VCCSA as well as VCCIO receive stable current supply from one phase each. Regarding the VCCIO it's worth noticing, that a smaller voltage converter is being used. On this board Supermicro uses Vitec 59PR72151 inductors, which feature a saturation current of 66A and a maximum operating temperature of 125°C. There is no other vendor today, which is using higher quality inductors on their consumer motherboards. Apart from that Supermicro doesn't do any phase splitting, which means every single phase is controlled by the main PWM chips directly. These come from International Rectifier and go by the name IR35203. Unfortunately there is no datasheet available on these chips.
Having a closer look at the six CPU phases as well as the three iGPU phases, we find one IR3556M power stage per phase, which features up to 50A. Compared to any other Z170 based consumer motherboard, this is the highest quality power design we've seen so far and apparently it's completely overengineered and therefore offers excellent endurance.

There is a total of four DIMM-slots on the C7Z170-SQ and the board officially supports DDR4-3200. There is enough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 2.0. If you want to put your memory in place, you have to push down a lash, which is located close to the graphics card and not near the top edge of the board. If you want to swap your memory when there is a dedicated gaming graphics card in the slot, there is not too much space to push the lash down. We would like to see the lash close to the top edge of the boards, which would make swapping memory even easier.

On the C7Z170-SQ the southbridge is being cooled by a passive cooling block. A closer look at the VRM area shows there are two more heatsinks. All heatsinks on this board are pretty small. Apparently this means there is a lot of space around the CPU socket, which makes installing hardware a bit more comfortable. On the other hand there are the looks where the heatsinks play a big part. Other vendors use larger heatsinks in order to make the board look more better and especially these days many useres buy motherboards judging them by the looks.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 14 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Layout	Page 15 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 16 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - BIOS	Page 17 - Cinebench
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 18 - Tomb Raider
Page 7 - Preview / Gallery	Page 19 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - 3D Mark	Page 20 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 21 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 22 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - PC Mark 8	Page 23 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - SiSoft Sandra 1	Page 24 - Conclusion