SuperMicro C9Z390-CG-IW Z390 Motherboard Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

A smaller motherboard this may be, but it still seems pretty competitive with other Z390 solutions. It scored strongly in 3DMark with 23274. Certainly not the fastest Z390, but it wasn’t the slowest either. It did score the lowest score we’ve ever had in Unigine though, albeit it doesn’t take much to go from the top to the bottom of that chart, as all scores are pretty close. Things improved for PCMark 10 Express, where it beast out the Aorus Master and the Maximus XI Hero, somehow! However, quite a few other Z390 motherboards did a little better, but this is still very competitive.

I thought that WPrime and Cinebench would trip it up, and I was right. I was much slower in WPrime, which suggests some throttling after extended load. However, that was to be expected given the much smaller VRM coolers compared to every other Z390 motherboard we’ve tested. Interestingly, Cinebench did better, but still showed signs of slowing down on the all-cores test, but single core performance was still pretty fantastic.

Scores

• 3DMark – 23274
• Unigine – 5436
• PCMark 10 – 5629
• WPrime – 3.644/97.255
• Cinebench – 215/1865
• Handbrake – 75.1

3DMark Firestrike

Unigine Superposition

PCMark 10 Express

WPrime

Cinebench R15

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K