Why an Overclockable Core i3 Might Not Exist: The Supermicro C7H170-M and Intel Core i3-6100TE Review
by Ian Cutress on March 17, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Motherboards
- Core i3
- Supermicro
- Overclocking
Board Features
For $128, it is perhaps odd that we’re not seeing USB 3.1 here as it is one of the primary reasons for users to upgrade to a Skylake based system. The audio and networking portion are good for the price, and there are certainly plenty of USB 3.0 ports/headers to make up for the deficit. The lack of fan controls is somewhat of an issue, especially with all the headers, and for this price we would have also liked to have seen a two-digit debug to help with errors.
| Supermicro C7H170-M | |
| Warranty Period | 3 Years |
| Product Page | Link |
| Price | Amazon US |
| Size | mATX |
| CPU Interface | LGA1151 |
| Chipset | Intel H170 |
| Memory Slots (DDR4) | Four DDR4, Supporting 64GB, Dual Channel, Up to 2133 MHz |
| Memory Slots (DDR3L) | None |
| Video Outputs | HDMI DisplayPort DVI-D |
| Network Connectivity | Intel I219-V |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC1150 |
| PCIe Slots for Graphics (from CPU) | 1 x PCIe 3.0 (x16) |
| PCIe Slots for Other (from PCH) | 1 x PCIe 3.0 x4 1 x PCIe 3.0 x1 |
| Onboard SATA | Six, RAID 0/1/5/10 |
| Onboard SATA Express | None |
| Onboard M.2 | 1x PCIe 3.0 x4, RAID 0/1/5/10 |
| Onboard U.2 | None |
| USB 3.1 | None |
| USB 3.0 | 4 x Rear Panel 4 via headers |
| USB 2.0 | 2 x Rear Panel 2 via headers |
| Power Connectors | 1 x 24-pin ATX 1 x 8-pin CPU 1 x 4-pin |
| Fan Headers | 1 x CPU (4-pin) 4 x Fan (4-pin) |
| IO Panel | 1 x Combination PS/2 2 x USB 2.0 4 x USB 3.0 1 x Network RJ-45 HDMI DisplayPort DVI-D Audio Jacks |
| Other Features | Thunderbolt Header Power/Clear CMOS Buttons BIOS Restore Button Front Panel Header Front Audio Header COM Header |
In The Box
We get the following:
Quick List
Rear IO Shield
Driver DVD
M.2 Screws
Four double-length SATA cables
The C7H170-M certainly comes in an interesting box shape, but in the box there isn’t much to talk about – but this is to be expected for a $128 motherboard. The double length SATA cables are interesting though, as it’s a first on a motherboard that I’ve ever tested. Perhaps Supermicro’s customer research teams gave SATA cable length as one of their primary concerns? Not sure there.
Visual Inspection
Supermicro’s gaming line is designated ‘SuperO’, and much like almost all of the gaming motherboard lines on the market comes in a red and black livery. Whether you like the red plus black combination, it seems that Supermicro is coming up against a few aesthetic issues that the other motherboard manufacturers have come up against: placing the white box around every part for the automated placement machines detracts from the overall look. This will probably be looked at but take time to adjust, as it did with the other manufacturers.
By virtue of this being a H series chipset, there is not much of the over engineering we see on the Z series chipset based motherboards. The power delivery has a small heatsink over one part of it rather than the whole set, and this doesn’t extend over other areas or to the chipset heatsink because it doesn’t really need to. The socket area around the CPU bracket is very busy, with plenty of standard filter caps and resistors, which also takes away from the look. I would also point out that the DRAM spacing between the slots is irregular, which also looks odd and given this I would assume that Supermicro is not implementing a T-topology memory design.
For users keeping track of fan header placement, the socket has immediate access to all five – three 4-pin headers along the top (the CPU one is the one in the middle), one 4-pin on the left near the 4-pin power, and one to the right above the SATA ports.
On the top right side of the motherboard, we have three buttons. In most motherboard designs, these would be power, reset and reset BIOS – but here they are power, reset BIOS and BIOS restore. The last one is to restore the BIOS in the event of a corruption – because Supermicro does not have an easy way to update the BIOS yet, any attempt to flash the BIOS is more risky than the other manufacturers right now, so this button may be vital in some circumstances.
At this point I want to talk about the excessive amount of jumpers on this motherboard.
In total I count ten, most of which are not labelled in the materials which leads me to believe that they’re just for internal testing when designing the motherboard. These are typically removed in the final design, but for whatever reason they are kept here.
Most of them are on the bottom of the motherboard, and this is where we find the second USB 3.0 header (the first being above the SATA slots), a TPM header, the front panel header, a COM header, a USB header and a Thunderbolt card header.
There is no special shielding here in play for the Realtek ALC1150 audio codec on the left hand side, but it seems to perform well in our tests. The PCIe layout gives a single PCIe 3.0 x16 from the CPU – the H series chipset means that Supermicro has to play by the rules and only offer a single PCIe slot from the CPU when the H-series is in use. The other two PCIe slots are an x4 and x1 from the chipset – I would have preferred if these were open ended, as this would allow other x8 or x16 cards to be used, albeit with limited bandwidth. Above the PCIe slots is our M.2 slot, supporting PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 drives.
The rear IO panel has a combination PS/2 port, two USB 2.0 ports, three video outputs (DVI-D, HDMI, DisplayPort), four USB 3.0 ports, a network port and the audio jacks.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-6700K (ES, Retail Stepping), 91W, $350 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 4.0 GHz (4.2 GHz Turbo) |
| Intel Core i3-6100TE, 35W, $117 2 Cores, 4 Threads, 2.7 GHz |
|
| Motherboards | Supermicro C7H170-M |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | Corsair DDR4-2133 C15 2x8 GB 1.2V or G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2133 C15 2x8 GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | JEDEC @ 2133 |
| Video Cards | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) ASUS R7 240 2GB |
| Hard Drive | Crucial MX200 1TB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.
For reference, the Supermicro C7H170-M, on our testing BIOS 1.0c, MCT was not enabled by default. Also, the FCLK 10x ratio was not present in the BIOS tested at the time of testing.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to AMD for providing us with the R9 290X 4GB GPUs.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with GTX 980 Strix GPUs and the R7 240 DDR3 GPU.
Thank you to ASRock and ASUS for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to Crucial for providing us with MX200 SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill and Corsair for providing us with memory.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
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ViperV990 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
The i5-6400 @ $180 seems to be a much better part to OC.nightbringer57 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Heh, when some of the younger ones today speak about overclocking, I like to remember them of how much more financially interesting overclocking used to be. It's like everyone forget how overclocking worked a few years ago. I still remember my cheap student gaming PC with a Pentium E2180 that went from 2GHz to 3GHz with a standard tower rad and only a slight voltage boost. Then you could have almost all of the performance of the 300€ CPUs (except a good bit of the cache) for 60€ or so. Multiplier overclocking is easier, yes, and it's good to reach insane peak frequencies - but this market of the "buy low, push high" overclocking has faded out (courtesy, of course, of the segmentation by core numbers as well)BrokenCrayons - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Oh yeah, well I overclocked when there were still turbo buttons on the fronts of AT cases! So nyah nyah!Sarcasm aside though, drawing a line in the sand to mark when overclocking was "good" or "worthwhile" and when it stopped being fun or have any sort of point would result in an awful lot of people drawing an awful lot of lines all over the place. For instance, the last processor I bothered with overclocking was a 2GHz Pentium 4 derived Celeron. Pushing the FSB from 100 to 150MHz on an Intel boxed cooler with a little bit of extra voltage netted a 3GHz chip...which rapidly became highly unstable over the course of a few months. After that and numerous PIIs, PIIIs, the infamous Celeron 300A and whatnot, I got bored with it and my priorities shifted. I would have overclocked my VIC-20 and Trash 80 if I'd known more about computers because I couldn't resist tinkering. I think if one were to ask other people, they'd find different points in time and different processor technologies so it's probably unfair to people who are simply by nature of the date of their birth, unable to discuss overclocking in terms you're more comfortable with.
nightbringer57 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Yes, but still. There had been a more or less constant trend of tinkering around with low-end CPUs to get quasi-high-end performance out of them for quite a long time. I quote my old E2180, but over the "modern" history of computers (that is, in the current context, IBM PC and their heir), there had always been such shenanigans available to the tinkerers. If you go further in time, the trend fades as the modern concept of CPU "range" fades out and it came more down to boosting your X - generation CPU to still have a bit more oomph after most of the software environment of you given platform had moved to a new generation.And not only Intel processors, but AMD processors as well, with the pencil unlockable Durons and whatnot.
As this article states, this kind of overclocking has more or less died in recent years, partly due to technical issues (as systems get more and more complex and integrated, it becomes riskier), partly due to the current state of the market, partly due to marketing practices.
It's not about discussing overclocking in terms I personally am comfortable with or whatnot. It's just about being realistic. I hope that AMD can come back with Zen and bring a bit more freshness into the low-end overclocking market.
Spoelie - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link
Still had a lot of fun in the period between 2000-2010 with the Athlons, always buying the lowest end SKU of the performance line, and ocing between 20-40% to reach the same performance of the highest end SKU in the line.E.g.
On an nForce2 board IIRC
* Athlon XP 1800+ (Socket A Thoroughbred 256KB cache) 1533mhz OC to ~2ghz
* Athlon XP 2500+ (Socket A Barton 512KB cache) FSB166 to FSB200 = OC to "3200+"
Had a Athlon 64 2800+ on a Socket 754 for a very short time, don't remember what I did to it.
Then a "DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D" (Socket 939 w/ nForce4 & 2*512MB Winbond BH-5 PC3200 @ 250mhz 2-2-2), cream of the crop at the time.
* Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice) OC 1800 to 2250 (250bus)
* Opteron 165 (Toledo) OC 1800 to 2475 (274bus)
I loved those days
Murloc - Sunday, March 20, 2016 - link
yeah I remember a 45nm core 2 duo I had, with the boxed stock cooler I was able to lower the voltage quite a bit and daily OC it at 4GHz at the same time.It was a lucky piece compared to others.
cobrax5 - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link
I'm thinking about replacing my 45nm i7-930 @ 3.8ghz with a hex-core, 32nm Xeon and OC that to > 3.6ghz. You can get them for like under $200, and I'll keep my (admittedly aging) X58 platform.benedict - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Single-threaded benchmarks show this processor to be much better than what it'd be in real life. I don't know if there are people who only run a single program at a time on their PCs. Having more cores is much more valuable than most benchmarks will show.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
I can run 7 programs at once, but if one is very demanding and is single threaded, then single threaded performance is still quite relevant. Multiple programs/=/not needing single threaded performance. Thinking that single threaded performance is not important got AMD the FX series, and subsequently a large portion of their users jumping to intel.calculagator - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Everyone is different, but single threaded benchmarks give a much better picture of performance for "normal" users than multithreaded in my experience. Even if they have lots of programs running, most users are only using one program at a time. All of those open documents and web tabs use very little CPU power while they just sit there. I have about 100 active processes right now, but my CPU is idling at about 3% usage.Even a basic dual-core CPU can handle most users' multitasking. The most common exceptions are gaming and video editing, but most users are not doing those things most of the time. Consider how people use laptops so often: their CPUs have such high single-threaded/burst performance that they hardly notice how much less powerful they are than much more powerful desktop CPUs.