SuperO C9Z390-PGW Motherboard Review

Performance and Overclocking Overview
With the SuperO C9Z390-PGW on Auto settings performance is unimpressive, however the results bear some scrutiny. In pure CPU tests such as Blender the SuperO looks fairly awful but in more general tasks such as 3D Mark where the emphasis is more on the graphics side of things you get good results. When it comes to games we were truly surprised to see the SuperO performed well, which suggests you need to approach raw clock speeds with a good deal of caution.

When the CPU was running with a higher power limit we saw better performance and then when we overclocked things looked very healthy. It is worth pointing out that our settings required a good deal of experimentation and the BIOS is clearly rather delicate. Get the settings right and the system behaves well but when the system is almost right it will behave correctly for a while and may well freeze at an unexpected moment.

We arrived at two conclusions that are closely related. The preset overclocking profiles are useful as a starting point but simply do not work as supplied. The other point is that this motherboard desperately requires more development. It is potentially very good but at present requires many hours of work to get the performance to the same level as other Z390 motherboards from Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI.

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