The NZXT N7 Z370 Motherboard Review: A New Player in the Motherboard Market

CPU Performance, Short Form

For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC for the supported frequency of the processor for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.

Rendering - Blender 2.78: link

For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.

The Blender results show just how core/thread heavy Blender can use. Where most of the 7900X results are around 3 minutes and 20 seconds, the i7-8700K took over 5 minutes to complete. When mixing it up with the other i7-8700K and their varied Uncore speeds, the N7 (in Orange) and its 4.2 GHz Uncore manged to be the  quickest of the bunch by two seconds. 

Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.

POV-Ray, though sensitive to frequency, also can use a lot of cores. Again we see i9-7900X results and its 20 threads scoring a lot higher. When compared with the other 8700K results, they are all extremely close. POVRay doesn't respond to differences in Uncore it seems. 

Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link

Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.

WinRAR is another test where cores and threads matter, but not quite as much as we have seen above. The NZXT N7 board drives the i7-8700K to complete this benchmark in 40.7 seconds. It ends up a mere two seconds behind the EVGA boards, which again will run this test a bit slower than the other boards. Here Uncore seems to matter more as the 4.4 GHz Uncore is a bit over two seconds faster than the N7 i7-8700K's result. It even manages to beat the i9-7900X.

Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link

As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.

Our 7Zip results again show how much difference cores and threads can make. The N7 pushed our i7-8700K to a 39K result, notably behind the tightly packed group of results hitting almost 60K. The N7 i7-8700K's results was ahead of the other two like CPUs here by a small margin. 

Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz, and IPC win in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.

3DPM21 has the i7-8700K reaching 1838 Mop/s, with the rest of the 20 thread $1000 CPUs around 2800. Between all three i7-8700Ks the scores were nearly exactly the same. 

Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link

The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).

The DigiCortex results have the i7-8700K coming in at 0.99 here just barely under the threshold for simulations in real-time. The 8700K with the lowest Uncore also managed to be the slowest result. Both the N7's 4.2 GHz and the other i7 8700K's 4.4 GHz managed the same result.