The Supermicro C7Z370-CG-IW Motherboard Review: SM's First Mini-ITX Gaming Board

CPU Performance, Short Form

For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC for the supported frequency of the processor for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.

All of our tests were done with the 65W Power Limit removed unless where stated.

Rendering - Blender 2.78: link

For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.

Our Blender results for SuperO board (in red) shows the stock results coming in almost a minute slower than the rest of the Z370 based results. After investigating why this was, it was determined we were running into the power limit of the board. By default, the first power limit (PL) state was set to 65W, below default TDP of the chip itself. Once that value was raised to 95W or above, the new result (in orange) changed and the SuperO board results were in the ballpark of the other boards tested. If a user is running heavily threaded applications and would like the full power of Intel's CPU, they will need to raise the conservative power limit values. 

Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.

POV-Ray is another benchmark sensitive to frequency and able to use a lot of cores. Again we see two results on this board with the default scoring much lower than expected at 2842. Once we raised the power limit and re-ran this benchmark, the results fell right in line with the SuperO board reaching 3419 points per second, the second fastest Z370 run so far. It really seems that in order to use this processor fully, power limits need to be raised out of the box in order to prevent throttling at stock speeds with heavy multi-threaded loads. 

Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link

Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.

WinRAR is another test where cores and threads matter, but not quite as much as we have seen above. The SuperO board drives the i7-8700K to complete this benchmark in 40.9 seconds placing it with the most other Z370 results.

Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link

As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.

The 7-Zip results show the SuperO board coming in last here with a score of 37591. This is around 1000 points away from what we would consider being the middle of the bell curve. We have a total of six results within 2000 points (or around 5%) of each other. Most of the differences, including the SuperO result, can be attributed to a margin of error or run variance. 

Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz, and IPC win in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.

In 3DPM21, The SuperO boards reached 1816 Mop/s, which happend to be last in this testing. That said, the scores of all Z370 and i7-8700K testing were within 60 points (around 3%) of each other. The CPUs all ran the same speeds in this test, so again we see margin of error size differences between our datasets so far. 

Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link

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. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).

The DigiCortex results have the i7-8700K coming in at 0.96, again at the bottom looking up at the others. The results here are all within around 5% as well.