Connectors and I/O

Supermicro equipped the C7Z170-OCE with six angled SATA ports. All of them offer 6Gbps bandwidth. There are no SATA Express ports on this board and we have to say we don't miss them, since there are virtually no peripherals with this connector. Supermicro provided practical onboard power- and reset-buttons and there is also a debug LED on this board as well as a speaker. There is also a M.2 x4 Gen3 Slot, which can be equipped with all form factors of M.2 cards. This board also features a PEX8747 chip, which is a lanes splitter. This chip allows for triple GPU setups and an the same time, there is absolutely no lane splitting necessary. In other words it's possible to equip every single port or slot with cards or peripherals simultaneoulsy.

  

There is a total of five fan headers on the C7Z170-OCE which is more than enough, to provide a well equipped high-end or workstation with fresh air. The fan header are located close to the CPU as well as spread over the board. Other than that it's a good thing that all of them feature four pins, which allows for rpm regulation in BIOS as well as under Windows.

  

  

Looking at the external connectors directly at the back-panel Supermicro equipped the C7Z170-OCE with one USB 3.1 Type C port, two USB 3.1 and two USB 2.0 ports, two Intel gigabit ethernet ports, as well as an optical out and an analogue audio panel and a PS/2 port. Furthermore there is also an HDMI, a DisplayPort and a DVI-D connector.