The Supermicro C9Z390-PGW Motherboard Review: The Z390 Board With PLX and 10GbE
by Gavin Bonshor on February 1, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Broadcom
- Supermicro
- ATX
- PLX
- PLX8747
- Supero
- Z390
- C9Z390-PGW
- PEX8747
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 put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
For Z390 we are running an updated version of our test suite, including OS and CPU cooler. This has some effect on our results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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shabby - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Play harder? These guys need some new marketing people.crotach - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
They could include a sticker in the box that says "My other motherboard is an Asus"prophet001 - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Seems like Asus' quality has gone down in recent years?GTVic - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
I base my buying decisions exclusively on online comments like this.close - Tuesday, February 5, 2019 - link
Your alternative is to buy a significant number of boards (hundreds and up) and use them over a significant period (years) in order to have any hope of a reliability statistic based on a remotely relevant data set. Are you? Because otherwise when it comes to "quality" I agree, you DO base your buying decisions exclusively on online comments like this.GreenReaper - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Well that's why you got a Supermicro.philehidiot - Saturday, February 2, 2019 - link
Just out of interest, banter aside, I've been an incidental fan of Asus mobos for many decades in that, whilst I consider all the major brands, I always seem to end up with an Asus. It's not intentional, it's just perhaps that their selection of feature sets to market perhaps always seems to meet my needs. I've never had an Asus fail on me it must be said, (aside from an incident stemming purely from my own cackhandedness around a CPU socket) I've never had an issue and they've always seemed well built. My last Asus board was bought around 5-6 years ago and was just the same as the rest in terms of build. Is the general consensus that Asus's build quality has dropped and they should be treated with caution?jabber - Sunday, February 3, 2019 - link
I've had plenty of Asus and they have all been fine. I've got a X99 Asus at the moment and its been pretty solid. To be honest I've not seen a failed motherboard since the removal of electrolytic caps around 2006. I remember around 2009-2011 I was getting masses of PCs in from 2003/2006 with 'issues' and as soon as I opened them up I would see the crusty bulging caps.Boards have physically improved all round I would say. Now if they could get the bugs out of the BIOS...
Gadgety - Monday, February 4, 2019 - link
Yes, bugs, pathetic. PC industry is supposedly competitive, yet so many present half baked solutions, and lots of marketing talk. ASUS charges extra premium and still doesn't deliver a bug free BIOS.close - Tuesday, February 5, 2019 - link
I have a ROG board that stopped receiving driver and BIOS updates less than 2 years after launch. This wouldn't matter much if the existing drivers worked properly under Win10 and offered all the functionality advertised in big letters on the box. It didn't. I simply take that as a lesson to stay away from the praised high end. At least when they inevitably sh*t the pants I will not be too disappointed.But yes, it's still working although with just the occasional reset in memory parameters where it defaults to the lowest memory frequency. And some other small annoyances with the drive order. Etc. Great job they did on that BIOS.