Final Words & Conclusion
Final words & conclusion
The SuperMicro C7Z270-CG Gaming series motherboards is going to be a bit of a hard sell. I mean this board does not deliver on all fronts, and in a very competitive motherboard market it simply needs to be.
First let me state that features and build quality wise the board is fine. But at the fronts where it needs to excel that tone quickly changes. Performance was the lowest of all compared to roughly 10 other motherboards as SMC is applying very subtle and safe settings. Overclocking with this motherboard can be done, but here again we find the board to be user unfriendly with a complicated to work in UEFI BIOS. When we tried our 3200 and 3866 MHz XMP 2.0 enabled memory, and the system simply would not boot. These factors alone aren't however the biggest issue for SMC. Let's say it like it is, it is the sheer looks of this motherboard that might be its biggest problem. It seems that SMC somehow upholds aesthetic guidelines of the year 2001. Who uses mint-green in the year 2017? Taste however is a personal and thus subjective thing.
If you have upgraded in the last year or two to a new PC, well, the upgrade remains a hard sell as well. This motherboard however does offers improvements as your platform will be upgraded towards full compatibility with USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) as well as two M.2 slots and U2 ports that obviously nobody cares about yet was not implemented.
Performance & tweaking
The overall performance for this SuperMicro C7Z270-CG motherboard with a Core i5 7600K I'd rate as "average to OK" for the results as tested with a Core i5 7600K. It's not and performance at all, but compared to the rest this motherboard offers the slowest baseline performance. Temps remain very acceptable(depending on choice of cooling) and temperatures when the CPU is overclocked with added voltage definitely seem to be a notch better opposed to Haswell and Skylake. We have been able to reach 4.9~5.0 GHz stable enough on liquid cooling but oveclocking with this board is complicated alright. At that level you are looking at up-to 1.35V needed on that CPU core.
Power consumption
If we step back and take the Intel reference board with a Sandy Bridge processor (2600K) without a dedicated graphics card, that platform idled at roughly 50 Watts. Once we stress the processor 100% on that platform we'd see ~120 Watts power consumption. With Kaby Lake (7600K) we noticed roughly 40 Watts in idle and 100 Watts with processor load at 100%. Things again remain relative.
The bottom line
The SuperMicro C7Z270-CG is going to be a tough sell. Other then a complete feature set nothing really stands out compared to the competition, and the competition is fierce alright. The main focus for SMC is marketing this board as a server grade quality to market this product. Quite honestly, I predict that the production line is very different from their server motherboard lines with very different QA levels. Also, if you look at component usage like capacitors MOSfets and such, it's not any different from any other brand. In fact I dare to state that ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock offer boards with maybe even better component usage and build quality. We do applaud the attempt for SuperMicro to open up a line into the PC gamers channel, it's just that to get at the same level as ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock they will seriously have to step up their game. I have no problem whatsoever with the feature and build quality of the C7Z270-CG, but the BIOS will need to be overhauled and the aesthetics of this series will to be improved dramatically. Only if you feel that SMC will offer you a server grade motherboard (which I honestly find to be a subjective marketing statement) this product in a closed chassis would be sufficient enough. Perhaps SMC however will sell this product at an incredibly low price making it more popular then I expect it to be, I do not know. My final worlds to SuperMicro would be these, please invest heavily in the actual looks, BIOS and high-frequency memory compatibility because at this stage this is a product series that simply has no appeal at all. Remove the way too busy on the eyes logos with the black/green/white and red element. Apply, two color tones ony and ditch the green. Subtlety on aesthetics is the keyword here. I have strong believe that SMC can release rock-solid and stable products into a difficult competitive channel, but your competition and demanding DIY PC community is at another level and for the gaming and PC DIY community it is exactly that complex combination of sheer looks, feel and that quality feature rich product that matter. A "server grade" sticker on the box is not going to sell these products in significant enough numbers as it just does not appeal enough to the target PC gaming audience.
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