SuperMicro C7Z170-SQ (LGA 1151) Motherboard Review

Introduction

SuperMicro isn’t that much of a household name in today’s market, you get swamped by all of the advertisements from Gigabyte, ASUS and similar. But turn back the calendar and everyone and their friend at least knew the name. Focusing primarily on the server and business market, SuperMicro doesn’t really cross the consumer line on a large-scale, but when it does we get server quality and performance at a much user-friendly level.

If you take a look back through the years of motherboard design, SuperMicro was quite late to adopt any special colour schemes or unique heat sink designs, the first notable design change being the C7Z87-OCE, which took the classic green PCB and changed to blue, wow! With the introduction of Z97, SuperMicro then started to spend a little bit more time and resources on the looks with the C7Z97-OCE.

Today in the testbench, we have the SuperMicro C7Z170-SQ. This is the current gaming option from the company and it doesn’t actually look too bad. The key red touches and subtle heat sink design leans more towards a gaming feel. Let’s find out if the company has been successful in the consumer venture this time in our testing.

Specifications

Packing and Accessories

Why does it feel that this box has come straight from the 1980’s, with the cut corners and laser effect font.

The back of the box features a fair amount of text describing what SuperMicro can bring to the Z170 chipset and consumers. There is a small specification list and feature images, but something that has really caught my eye is the old style Intel Core logos. I’m sure Intel spend a lot of money on this branding, so hopefully future consumer products will feature the newer style.

You can tell that SuperMicro are focused on performance and quality rather than the ‘shiny’ things. Inside the box is a standard IO shield, extra long (server style) SATA cables and an in-depth product leaflet and driver disc.