Supermicro Dips its Toes in DIY Motherboard Market, Unveils C7Z87-OCE

Known more for its server and workstation motherboards; and rackmount server chassis; Supermicro dipped its toes into consumer (DIY) motherboards, announcing the C7Z87-OCE, a socket LGA1150 motherboard based on the Intel Z87 Express chipset. Built in the standard ATX form-factor, this board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, and 8-pin EPS connectors. It features a rather bland blue PCB, with seemingly basic heatsinks over the chipset and CPU VRM. In reality, the 22 nm-built Z87 Express PCH, with a 4.1W TDP can make do with a heatsink like that. The one on the VRM, on the other hand, is suspect. It appears to use a 6-phase digital PWM circuitry with driver-MOSFETs.



The LGA1150 socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, and three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x16/NC/NC, x8/x8/NC, x8/x4/x4). A trio of close-ended PCI-Express 2.0 x4 find room in between them. The board offers a total of eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, six from the Z87 PCH, two from a third-party controller. Also on offer, are eight USB 3.0 ports, four on the rear panel, four by headers. The board offers 8-channel HD audio with optical SPDIF output, a pair of gigabit Ethernet interfaces, Thunderbolt (which doubles up as mini-DisplayPort), dual-link DVI and D-Sub display outputs. Although driven by AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS, it features a classic keyboard-driven setup program UI. The company didn't release pricing. Find a complete review at the source.

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