Benchmarks: CPU
CPU benchmarks reveal the Supermicro C7Z97-M is a tad slower than the competition. From a snoop in the BIOS we can see that this is from the less-aggressive turbo core management that Supermicro applies to the Core i7-4790K compared to rival motherboards. Single-threaded performance isn't affected since the turbo frequency only eases back when all four cores are loaded. Users could easily get around this by forcing the ratio higher in the BIOS.
Supermicro issued a new BIOS which it claims deal with the lower-than-expected CPU performance, and our testing reveals it did indeed improve performance. However, the BIOS update is a little slap-dash with a manual 4.4GHz clock speed override rather than using a Turbo profile that keeps the clock speed at 4.4GHz under load. As we'll see later on in the review this solution forces idle power consumption up compared to the competition.
