The Supermicro C7Z370-CG-IW Motherboard Review: SM's First Mini-ITX Gaming Board
by Joe Shields on April 30, 2018 12:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Mini ITX
- Supermicro
- Coffee Lake
- Z370
- i7-8700K
- C7Z370
Benchmark Overview
For our testing, depending on the product, we attempt to tailor the presentation of our global benchmark suite down into what users who would buy this hardware might actually want to run. For CPUs, our full test suite is typically used to gather data and all the results are placed into Bench, our benchmark database for users that want to look at non-typical benchmarks or legacy data. For motherboards, we run our short form CPU tests, the gaming tests with half the GPUs of our processor suite, and our system benchmark tests which focus on non-typical and non-obvious performance metrics that are the focal point for specific groups of users.
The benchmarks fall into several areas:
Short Form CPU
Our short form testing script uses a straight run through of a mixture of known apps or workloads and requires about four hours. These are typically the CPU tests we run in our motherboard suite, to identify any performance anomalies.
| CPU Short Form Benchmarks | |
| Three Dimensional Particle Movement v2.1 (3DPM) | 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, derived from my academic research years looking at particle movement parallelism. The coding for this tool was rough, but emulates the real world in being non-CompSci trained code for a scientific endeavor. The code is unoptimized, but the test uses OpenMP to move particles around a field using one of six 3D movement algorithms in turn, each of which is found in the academic literature. |
| The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. | |
| WinRAR 5.4 | WinRAR is a compression based software to reduce file size at the expense of CPU cycles. We use the version that has been a stable part of our benchmark database through 2015, and run the default settings on a 1.52GB directory containing over 2800 files representing a small website with around thirty half-minute videos. We take the average of several runs in this instance. |
| POV-Ray 3.7.1 b4 | POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multi threaded benchmark. |
| HandBrake v1.0.2 | HandBrake is a freeware video conversion tool. We use the tool in to process two different videos into x264 in an MP4 container - first a 'low quality' two-hour video at 640x388 resolution to x264, then a 'high quality' ten-minute video at 4320x3840, and finally the second video again but into HEVC. The low-quality video scales at lower performance hardware, whereas the buffers required for high-quality tests can stretch even the biggest processors. At current, this is a CPU only test. |
| 7-Zip 9.2 | 7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results. |
| DigiCortex v1.20 | The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. |
System Benchmarks
Our system benchmarks are designed to probe motherboard controller performance, particularly any additional USB controllers or the audio controller. As general platform tests we have DPC Latency measurements and system boot time, which can be difficult to optimize for on the board design and manufacturing level.
| System Benchmarks | |
| Power Consumption | One of the primary differences between different motherboads is power consumption. Aside from the base defaults that every motherboard needs, things like power delivery, controller choice, routing and firmware can all contribute to how much power a system can draw. This increases for features such as PLX chips and multi-gigabit ethernet. |
| Non-UEFI POST Time | The POST sequence of the motherboard becomes before loading the OS, and involves pre-testing of onboard controllers, the CPU, the DRAM and everything else to ensure base stability. The number of controllers, as well as firmware optimizations, affect the POST time a lot. We test the BIOS defaults as well as attempt a stripped POST. |
| Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5 | Testing onboard audio is difficult, especially with the numerous amount of post-processing packages now being bundled with hardware. Nonetheless, manufacturers put time and effort into offering a 'cleaner' sound that is loud and of a high quality. RMAA, with version 6.2.5 (newer versions have issues), under the right settings can be used to test the signal-to-noise ratio, signal crossover, and harmonic distortion with noise. |
| USB Backup | USB ports can come from a variety of sources: chipsets, controllers or hubs. More often than not, the design of the traces can lead to direct impacts on USB performance as well as firmware level choices relating to signal integrity on the motherboard. |
| DPC Latency | Another element is deferred procedure call latency, or the ability to handle interrupt servicing. Depending on the motherboard firmware and controller selection, some motherboards handle these interrupts quicker than others. A poor result could lead to delays in performance, or for example with audio, a delayed request can manifest in distinct audible pauses, pops or clicks. |
Gaming
Our gaming benchmarks are designed to show any differences in performance when playing games.
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Srikzquest - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
Hi Joe, How is the Realtek Wifi card compared to Intel? And How many onboard USB Headers are available? and which versions are available, I see you mentioned USB 3.0 but are there others? Thank you...Srikzquest - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
Sorry, read it again and I see there are 2 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0 onboard headers available. I still would like to know more about the Realtek Wifi Card though, I haven't see any itx boards with that so far.MrCommunistGen - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
On page 4 of the review under "Board Features" the card is listed as:1 x Realtek TRL9922BE Wi-Fi ac 2T/2R
I don't have any direct experience with this model, but I have used their previous generation RTL-8821AE which is a 1T1R wireless-AC card. It came with a mini-ITX H97 board I bought for home theater use.
For Wi-Fi only duties the card performs fine, but the link rate is limited to 433Mbps due to the single stream nature of the card. With good signal I got almost exactly half the sustained transfer rates as with a 2 stream Intel 7260 or with the 2 stream Broadcom BCM94352. So in that regard performance seemed to be pretty good, matching what was expected based on the specs.
That said, I definitely saw some strange behavior when I tried to use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth simultaneously (playing audio to a BT speaker while watching streaming video online). Either the audio would have frequent dropouts OR the data stream would be interrupted, causing buffering.
My guess would be that, despite having both 2.4GHz and 5GHz capability, they only had 1 full transmit/receive chain and that the radio was having to cycle back and forth between the two to maintain both the wireless AC and Bluetooth. I worked around it by using a USB Bluetooth dongle I had on-hand until I was able to replace the card.
Hopefully Realtek has addressed this with the newer model.
ianmills - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
There is interference between USB 3.0 and 2.4ghz wifi. As far as I know there is no solution other than moving the 2 as far apart as possible. Intel has a page about it here https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/univers...MrCommunistGen - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
Thanks, but:1. I was using 5GHz WiFi
2. The card is mini-PCI-E, not USB.
Yeah, the Bluetooth is probably connected over USB, but I've tested both the Intel 7260AC and Broadcom BCM94352, and neither of those has issues streaming video while also doing Bluetooth audio.
Srikzquest - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
I did further reading and looks like this particular card has MU-MIMO capability, may be that will help with the transmit/receive pipeline.Hakaslak - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link
Anything stopping us from pulling out the Realtek Wifi card and putting in a card with the same interface, i.e. mPCIe Intel 8260, or a M.2 2230 9260NGW?DanNeely - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
As limited as this boards power distribution appears to be I'm not convinced lifting the current limits is a good idea.Roen - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
The power distribution is better than the Asus, even though it has less phases, it can handle more juice.Srikzquest - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
It has all the features compared to other flagship boards except for Thunderbolt port I believe which if I am correct not many people use or need but other boards also do have their share of omissions.1. Asus ROG Strix Z370 I (No HDMI 2.0, No rear USB 3.1 ports, only Header available)
2. Asrock Fatality Z370 I (No USB 3.1 Ports)
3. Gigabyte Z370N Wifi (No USB 3.1 Ports)
4. MSI Z370I GAMING PRO CARBON AC (No HDMI 2.0)