SuperO C9Z590-CGW Motherboard Review

1. Introducing SuperO C9Z590-CGW2. The Hardware, BIOS and Test Setup3. CPU Testing - Time Spy and Blender4. CPU Testing - Cinebench R15 and R235. Gaming Tests6. Testing: Power and Temperatures7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

To our way of thinking, the only reason for buying a Core i9-11900K with a Z590 motherboard is because you want the storming gaming performance that comes from eight cores running at clock speeds around 5GHz. You know this will require around 250W for your CPU and naturally that will put a strain on your cooling system but you're Ok with that, provided your expensive hardware delivers the goods.

The major problem here is that SuperO doesn't want to play the game that way and instead respects Intel's power limits with the result that your expensive hardware runs slowly. To make matter worse SuperO does not currently support Intel Adaptive Boost so this motherboard could use an H570 chipset rather than a Z590 and we would be none the wiser.

Clearly we could make life easier on the SuperO C9Z590-CGW if we swapped out the Core i9 CPU for a Core i7 or Core i5 and that would make perfect sense if we were dealing with a budget motherboard that cost, say, £200.

Instead we have been told the SuperO C9Z590-CGW will cost £419 here in the UK and for that sort of money we expect a premium motherboard that behaves perfectly, delivers good performance and is supplied with a list of impressive features. Instead we have a Z590 motherboard that performs poorly out of the box and which has features that are nothing special.

SuperO could help the C9Z590-CGW by fixing the BIOS and lowering the price to a sensible level, but you still have a bit of a conundrum where the offer is a gaming platform with 10 Gigabit Ethernet and nothing in the way of RGB. You may think that sounds like a confusing combination of features and frankly, we have to agree.

We haven't been able to find a buy-link for the SuperO C9Z590-CGW but the MSRP is £419 inc VAT.

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Pros:

• Dual Ethernet, including Marvell FastLinQ Edge 10Gbps.
• The board has POST code debug and Micro buttons.

Cons:

• BIOS 1.0 requires some work, including XMP.
• There are no RGB headers.
• BIOS 1.0 does not support Intel Adaptive Boost.
• At this price we expect Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi 6e.
• 6x 90A Infineon VRMs seem out of place on a high end ATX motherboard.

KitGuru says: For the time being we suggest you avoid the SuperO C9Z590-CGW.

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