Supermicro C7Z170-SQ Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 02.11.15Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the C7Z170-SQ, Supermicro has a gaming motherboard in its portfolio, which offers server-grade quality and that is what the price of this board reflects. Since there is simply the highest quality power design on this motherboard we've seen on any Z170 board, the vendor asks 240 Euro for this piece of hardware. Nevertheless we would have liked to see a better looking design, since this is an important aspect for gaming motherboard. Apart from that we liked the position of the M.2 x4 Gen 3 slots, which add a little bit more space between the CPU cooler and the graphics card - if palced in the first PCIe slot. | -
Design - Layout - Price |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| The Supermicro C7Z170-SQ's layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors and there are also practical power- and reset-buttons as well as a debug LED. Apart from that we like the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots. There is a total of three full sized PCI Express slots and between them there are x1 slots. This means that there is plenty of space for graphics card in multi GPU setups, but unfortunately this board only supports CrossFire and no SLI. As we already mentioned we also like the flexibility regarding storage connectors. | -
Angled SATA
connectors - Space around the CPU socket - Placement of PCIe slots - Number of different storage connectors - Power/reset button and no debug LED |
- No SLI | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 8th. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board comes in 5th out of 11 boards tested. On another note, we had a look at power consumption, and especially in idle this board is in a different league. | -
Power consumption |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| Supermicro has a beautiful looking BIOS. Meanwhile it's almost normal that a BIOS is complete, offering countless features. If you're looking for overclocking options you'll find a great many of them and they are equally practical for novices and extreme overclockers. We always love the pre-defined profiles, which makes overclocking quite a bit more efficient. Boosting our CPU to 5.0 GHz was absolutely no problem at all. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The C7Z170-SQ is a Z170 motherboard, where the vendor is using extremely high-end components. If you're looking for a gaming-grade motherboards, which has been built and pre-tested according to server standards, then the C7Z170-SQ is an excellent choice. Nevertheless you should be aware that this level of high-end components comes at a price and apart from that there are simply not enough USB ports at the back I/O panel and there is also no support for SLI - only Crossfire. | |||
| Rating | |||
| We give the Supermicro C7Z170-SQ sufficient 3 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
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