Supermicro C7Z170-OCE Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 21.01.16Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the C7Z170-OCE, Supermicro has an overclocking/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 338 Euro for this piece of hardware. Apart from that there is also a PEX8747 lane splitter on this motherboard and considering this the price is actually absolutely in line. We also like the fact that Supermicro decided to create a black and green motherboard, since these days there is basically no other motherboard with this color scheme. On the other hand it's a pity that the audio solution received red instead of green LED backlight. Other than that we like the slot layout, which make it easy to install your hardware since there is plenty of space. | -
Design |
- Red instead of green LED lighting | |
| Layout | + | - | |
| The Supermicro C7Z170-OCE'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 is always one slot space or an x1 slot. This means that there is plenty of space for graphics card in multi GPU setups. This board even allows you to configure triple card systems support 3-way SLI/CFX. 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 |
||
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 13th. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board comes in 8th out of 15 boards tested. On another note, we had a look at power consumption, and in idle this board score second to last and under load it comes in last. |
|
- Power Consumption - 3D Performance |
|
| 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 |
||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The C7Z170-OCE 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-OCE is an excellent choice. Apart from that this is actually by far the cheapest Z170 motherboard, which features a PEX8747 lane splitter. | |||
| Rating | |||
| We give the Supermicro C7Z170-OCE sufficient 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Review |
ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly Review
 |
|
|