Product Photos
The C9Z790-CGW arrived in a retail package, which is a typical flat box that looks similar to the one from the previous SUPERO motherboard series. The box contains everything we may need for installation. Inside, we will find a manual, driver’s DVD, I/O shield, cable stickers, WiFi antennas, SATA data cables, and screws for M.2 SSD.
Everything seems fine, but modern gaming motherboards already have an IO shield integrated with the motherboard. We can find it in most, even essential competitive motherboards.
The driver’s DVD seems pointless as most users don’t have any optical drives nowadays, and all brands provide drivers via their product websites. Most drivers are also built-in into modern operating systems. The exception can be Linux. The C9Z790-CGW is supported by some Linux distributions, which is a clear advantage over competitive motherboards that officially work only with the latest Windows.
The C9Z790-CGW presents similarly to the last two SUPERO generations. There are some improvements, but in general, we have to expect the same experience. For the first time, we can find RGB support and two ARGB connectors on the PCB. It doesn’t change the fact that designers forgot about some aesthetic details which are important for gamers and modders, like a 24-pin power connector. It’s hard to say why it’s white/creme when the motherboard is black/dark grey.
Power design also seems not so much different than we could see in the previous SUPERO series. Server-grade power phases and a single 8-pin power connector for the CPU should be more than enough to support 13900K. SUPERO guarantees that, while we don’t have a CPU to push it to the limits, so we have to trust the manufacturer. A similar design was enough to push the last-gen Core i9 up to 7GHz+, so it promises good results also this time.
The C9Z790-CGW doesn’t have any fans, and it doesn’t need any. The design is good enough to keep optimal temperatures passively.
Even while the CPU is loaded to the limits, then there are no electric noises called “coil whine”. It sometimes happens on cheaper motherboards or more often on graphics cards, but not on SUPERO motherboards.
The C9Z790-CGW is a well-equipped motherboard. It contains everything that higher competitive motherboards have and also some more like 10GbE LAN, which is available only on the most expensive motherboards. The same as in the Z590 motherboard, it’s Marvell AQC113 NIC.
The motherboard also supports three M.2 PCIe sockets. One of them is in PCIe 4.0 x4 standard, while the next two are PCIe 3.0 x4. This is exactly the same as we could see on the C9Z590-CGW motherboard. It’s a shame we can’t have PCIe 5.0 M.2 sockets or at least more in PCIe 4.0 standard. Even ITX motherboards support mixed PCIe 4.0+5.0 nowadays.
All M.2 sockets and SATA ports give us a chance to configure RAID 0/1/5/10. RAID0 has been less popular in the last few years, but if we are building a workstation, then RAID1 or RAID10 is still optimal.
The C9Z790-CGW has two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots which are perfect for new graphics cards. If we use one of the slots, then both will run at x8 speed. It’s exactly the same as on competitive motherboards. I wish to see the first PCIe slot lower as it’s very close to large tower CPU coolers (as you can see in the photos below). It causes that removing the graphics card is really hard, and the motherboard has only a standard PCIe locking mechanism.
On the motherboard, we will also find multiple USB ports, including the USB 3.2 Gen 2, 20Gb/s standard. Good that SUPERO decided to keep this feature, as most competitive brands were saving on fast USB ports in this generation of motherboards. Nothing has also changed in the audio department. The C9Z790-CGW uses the same, and we could already say old, Realtek ALC1220 chip as in the last generations. Let’s say it could be worse as brands like ASRock went back to even older audio chips in their new AMD and Intel motherboards.
On the next page, we will take a look at BIOS/UEFI.
