NZXT N7 Z370 Motherboard Review

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Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Since fewer and fewer consumers seem to be buying discrete sound cards, the quality of a motherboard's onboard audio is now more important than ever. As such, we figured that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at just how good the analog signal quality is coming out of the onboard audio subsystem that is implemented on the NZXT N7. As mentioned earlier, this model features the modern Realtek ALC1220A codec and Nichicon Fine Gold audio capacitors. However, unlike most motherboards in this price range (and far below it) it does not have an aftermarket Texas Instruments amplifier, relying instead on the internal op-amp built into the Realtek codec. Also, it doesn't really have a PCB-level audio isolation line, nor a codec EMI cover, so it will be interesting to see what the results are.

Since isolated results don't really mean much, but we have also included some numbers from the plethora of motherboards that we have previously reviewed. While the budget GIGABYTE Z170-HD3 motherboard is based on the Realtek ALC887, a lower-end 7.1 channel HD audio codec, all of the other models feature onboard audio solutions that are built around the higher-end Realtek ALC1150 or ALC1220 codecs, but feature different op-amps, headphone amplifiers, filtering capacitors, secondary components and layouts.

We are going to do this using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, since sound quality isn't really something that can be adequately explained with only numbers. To do the quantitative portion, we have turned to RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA), which the standard application for this type of testing.

Since all modern motherboards support very high quality 24-bit, 192kHz audio playback we selected that as the sample mode option. Basically, what this test does is pipe the audio signal from the front-channel output to the line-in input via a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male mini-plug cable, and then RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA) does the audio analysis. Obviously we disabled all software enhancements since they interfere with the pure technical performance that we are trying to benchmark.

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As you can see, despite our initial concerns, the audio results are as good as could be expected. Harmonic distortion and noise is a little higher than some of the other motherboard's that we have recently reviewed, but the differences are so negligible as to be imperceptible by any mortal human. When six of the eight ratings are 'Excellent', there's not much room for criticism.

As we have mentioned in the past, at this high level we can't proclaim to notice a difference in qualitative audio quality between motherboards, especially since sound preference is intensely personal. However, when listening to a variety of music and spoken word content using a mix of Grado SR225i and Koss PortaPro headphones, Westone UM1 IEMs, and Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speakers, and the playback was clean and loud enough for our liking.

 

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Feature Testing: M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4

Feature Testing: M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4

One of the big advancements of the previous two LGA1151 platforms was the fact that they brought the M.2 slot to the mainstream. Not only did they make this modern storage connector available at a more reasonable price, but it was now properly implemented too. While some earlier platforms supported the M.2 interface most were speed limited or had a caveats list a mile long. Meanwhile all Z170 and Z270 motherboard boasted about their "full speed" PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 slots and our reviews verified those performance claims. With this new Z370 launch we expect similar performance levels from the M.2 slots, and that is what we are here to find out.

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Since few SSDs exist that can reach the 3.5-3.6GB/s real-life speed limit of this interface, we settled on one that can crack the 2000MB/s barrier: the Samsung SSD 950 PRO 256GB. Despite now being usurped by the SSD 960 PRO, this high performance NVMe PCI-E SSD combines Samsung's powerful UBX controller with its industry-leading 3D V-NAND and is capable of sequential read speeds of up to 2,200MB/second and write speeds of up to 900MB/sec.

One of the ways that we will be evaluating the performance of a motherboard's M.2 interface is by verifying that is capable of matching or exceeding these listed transfer rates. The other is by checking to see whether it performs as well as when we install the SSD 950 PRO onto a ASUS Hyper M.2 x4 expansion card plugged directly into a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot. The PCI-E lanes that the M.2 slot requires can come from either the processor or more usually the Z370 PCH, and we are interested to see how well that lane splitting was implemented and whether it is causing any performance issues. Also, since there are two M.2 slots, we are interested in determining whether there is a performance difference between both of them.

PCI-E vs M.2 Top vs M.2 Bottom​

As can see, the performance of the two M.2 slots on the N7 was effectively identical. Not only that but they were both fractionally faster than the performance we observed with the PCI-E adapter, but obviously the difference is so small that it's well within benchmark variances.

While transfer rates are obviously an important metric, we figured that it was also worthwhile to take a peak at instructions per second (IOPS) to ensure that there wasn't any variance there either:

PCI-E vs M.2 Top vs M.2 Bottom​

While the performance order stays the same as above, the differences are essentially non-existent and well within the margin of error for this benchmark. As a result, we think that it is fair to say that the M.2 interfaces on the NZXT N7 have been well implemented in so far as they all perform roughly identically.

 

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Manual Overclocking Results

Manual Overclocking Results

While we usually call this section "Auto & Manual Overclocking Results", this motherboard currently has no automatic overclocking functionality. In most cases that would be quite the black mark on a motherboard, but we are giving NZXT a little bit of leeway given that this is their very first motherboard. If they aren't feeling confident enough to immediately offer this feature, that is better than rushing and putting out a feature that doesn't work well on a wide range of systems. While we consider overclocking to be largely benign, it still involves additional voltage, additional heat, and ton of little factors that need to be taken into consideration. As a result, we are willing to wait for a well-implemented feature that is based on extensive testing with numerous processor samples and system configurations.

There won't be any ground breaking insights on how to overclock Coffee Lake - since it is as similar as Kaby Lake was to Skylake - but our personal pointers are to increase the vCore up to around 1.35V if you're cooling can handle it, while increasing the VCCIO up to 1.15V, and the System Agent voltage up to 1.20V if you plan on increasing the cache or memory frequency. If you are trying to achieve DDR4 memory speeds above DDR4-3866, try increasing the VCCIO to 1.20V, the vSA to 1.25V, and it might even be worth trying to increase the memory voltage to 1.40V or 1.45V on this platform. By the way, if you have an unlocked K-series processor, there's no reason to go crazy increasing the BCLK if you can achieve similar results by just tweaking the various multipliers instead.

Click on image to enlarge​

As mentioned above, while this page is usually called "Auto & Manual Overclocking Results" that doesn't really apply to the NZXT N7. The only hint of automatic overclocking is found in the basic UEFI mode - which only shows up if you're using the onboard HMDI output - and this 'Performance' preset doesn't actually do much of anything. All it did was increase the CPU ratio to 46X, but without adjusting any of the individual core multipliers above default. As a result, there wasn't actually any performance gains over stock.

Click on image to enlarge​

As you can see, we were able to overclock our six-core Core i7-8700K to 5.0GHz at a reasonable 1.35V. While there is undoubtedly more headroom available - and this motherboard was more than capable of exploiting it - we didn't really want to push additional through this chip just for marginal gains but a lot of more heat output.

Next we focused on maximizing cache and memory performance. We were able to push the cache from a constantly varying 4.20-4.40GHz up to 4.60Ghz, which helped make sure that there wouldn’t be a bandwidth bottleneck once we started pushing the memory clocks.

Now as you can see, this motherboard was able to run our G.Skill DDR4-3866 memory kit at its rated speed and timings. However, this wasn't quite as simple as simply applying the memory kit's XMP profile because the motherboard sets very conservative VCCSA and VCCIO voltages - 1.14V and 1.06V - but a liberal memory voltage of 1.45V. While this is good enough to boot and load Windows, it would not pass a twelve-thread HyperPI 32M test. As a result, in order to get full stability we had to manually adjust the VCCSA to 1.20V, the VCCIO to 1.16V, and the memory voltage to 1.38V.

It is clear to us that the N7 is a capable overclocker that is able to reach performance levels that any mainstream overclocker would be happy with. However, the experience is a little rough around the edges and you will need to do some manual tweaking. These issues are certainly not unexpected given that this is NZXT's first motherboard, but that doesn't mean that consumers should be willing to put up with a below average experience.

 

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System Benchmarks

System Benchmarks

In the System and Gaming Benchmarks sections, we reveal the results from a number of benchmarks run with the Core i7-8700K and NXZT N7 at default settings with the three different memory speeds, and using own our manual overclock. This will illustrate how much performance can be achieved with this motherboard in stock and overclocked form. For a thorough comparison of the Core i7-8700K versus a number of different CPUs have a look at our "Intel Coffee Lake i7-8700K & i5-8400 Review" article.

SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. We are running one instance of SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP. This is therefore a single-thread workload.

wPRIME 2.10

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. This is a highly multi-threaded workload.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench R15 64-bit
Test1: CPU Image Render
Comparison: Generated Score

The latest benchmark from MAXON, Cinebench R15 makes use of all your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene using various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. This particular benchmarking can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

WinRAR x64

WinRAR x64 5.40
Test: Built-in benchmark, processing 1000MB of data.
Comparison: Time to Finish

One of the most popular file archival and compression utilities, WinRAR's built-in benchmark is a great way of measuring a processor's compression and decompression performance. Since it is a memory bandwidth intensive workload it is also useful in evaluating the efficiency of a system's memory subsystem.

FAHBench

FAHBench 1.2.0
Test: OpenCL on CPU
Comparison: Generated Score

FAHBench is the official Folding@home benchmark that measures the compute performance of CPUs and GPUs. It can test both OpenCL and CUDA code, using either single or double precision, and implicit or explicit modeling. The single precision implicit model most closely relates to current folding performance.

HEVC Decode Benchmark v1.61

HEVC Decode Benchmark (Cobra) v1.61
Test: Frame rates at various resolution, focusing on the top quality 25Mbps bitrate results.
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

The HEVC Decode Benchmark measures a system's HEVC video decoding performance at various bitrates and resolutions. HEVC, also known as H.265, is the successor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) standard and it is very computationally intensive if not hardware accelerated. This decode test is done entirely on the CPU.

LuxMark v3.1

Test: OpenCL CPU Mode benchmark of the LuxBall HDR scene.
Comparison: Generated Score

LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmarking tool that utilizes the LuxRender 3D rendering engine. Since it OpenCL based, this benchmark can be used to test OpenCL rendering performance on both CPUs and GPUs, and it can put a significant load on the system due to its highly parallelized code.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 is the latest iteration of Futuremark’s system benchmark franchise. It generates an overall score based upon system performance with all components being stressed in one way or another. The result is posted as a generalized score. In this case, we tested with both the standard Conventional benchmark and the Accelerated benchmark, which automatically chooses the optimal device on which to perform OpenCL acceleration.

AIDA64 Memory Benchmark

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a diagnostic and benchmarking software suite for home users that provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives.

The benchmarks used in this review are the memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks. Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.

 

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Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark v1.1.0
Graphic Settings: Fire Strike Preset
Rendered Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark is the brand new cross-platform benchmark from the gurus over at Futuremark. Designed to test a full range of hardware from smartphones to high-end PCs, it includes three tests for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 hardware, and allows users to compare 3DMark scores with other Windows, Android and iOS devices. Most important to us is the new Fire Strike preset, a DirectX 11 showcase that tests tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Like every new 3DMark version, this test is extremely GPU-bound, but it does contain a heavy physics test that can show off the potential of modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

3DMark 11 v1.0.5
Graphic Settings: Extreme Preset
Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark 11 is Futuremark's very latest benchmark, designed to tests all of the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. At the moment, it is lot more GPU-bound than past versions are now, but it does contain a terrific physics test which really taxes modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage v1.1.2
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x1024

Test: Specific CPU Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score

3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses DirectX 10 exclusively so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about this benchmark. Along with being a very capable graphics card testing application, it also has very heavily multi-threaded CPU tests, such Physics Simulation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes it a good all-around gaming benchmark.

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark
Resolution: 1920x1080
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Graphic Settings: High

Comparison: Particle Performance Metric

Originally intended to demonstrate new processing effects added to Half Life 2: Episode 2 and future projects, the particle benchmark condenses what can be found throughout HL2:EP2 and combines it all into one small but deadly package. This test does not symbolize the performance scale for just Episode Two exclusively, but also for many other games and applications that utilize multi-core processing and particle effects. This benchmark might be a little old, but is still very highly-threaded and thus will keep scaling nicely as processors gain more and more threads. As you will see the benchmark does not score in FPS but rather in its own "Particle Performance Metric", which is useful for direct CPU comparisons.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict 1.2.0.0
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: High
Antialiasing 4X
Anisotropic Mode: 8X
Glow Enabled

Game Benchmark
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC) is the culmination of the X-series of space trading and combat simulator computer games from German developer Egosoft. With its vast space worlds, intricately detailed ships, and excellent effects, it remains a great test of modern CPU performance. While the X3 Reality engine is single-threaded, it provides us with an interesting look at performance in an old school game environment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Benchmark

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: Maximum IQ
DirectX 11
Fullscreen

Game Benchmark
Comparison: Generated Score

Square Enix released this benchmarking tool to rate how your system will perform in Heavensward, the expansion to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. This official benchmark software uses actual maps and playable characters to benchmark gaming performance and assign a score to your PC.

Grand Theft Auto V

DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Resolution: 1920x1080
FXAA: On
MSAA: X4
NVIDIA TXAA: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: X16
All advanced graphics settings off.

In GTA V, we utilize the handy in-game benchmarking tool. We do ten full runs of the benchmark and average the results of pass 3 since they are the least erratic. We do additional runs if some of the results are clearly anomalous. The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) is ostensibly multi-threaded, but it definitely places the bulk of the CPU load on only one or two threads.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Resolution: 1920x1080
Graphical Quality: Custom
Mesh/Shadow/Texture Filtering/Vegetation Range: Ultra
Lighting/Texture Quality/Ambient Occlusion: High
Depth of Field/Order Independent Transparency/Tesselation: Enabled

With its high resolution textures and several other visual tweaks, Shadow of Mordor’s open world is also one of the most detailed around. This means it puts massive load on graphics cards and should help point towards which GPUs will excel at next generation titles. We do three full runs of the benchmark and average the results.

 

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Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Voltage Regulation

Unsurprisingly, the NZXT N7 does not have onboard voltage measurement points, which is what we prefer to rely on in order to accurately measure the various system voltages. As a result, in this abbreviated overview, we utilized the AIDA64 System Stability Test to put a very substantial load on the system while also monitoring the stability of the all-important CPU Vcore line. This was achieved with a 180 minute stress test, and in order to increase the strain on the motherboard's voltage regulation components we overclocked our Core i7-8700K to 5.0Ghz at 1.35V.

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Since this motherboard has no Load-Line Calibration (LLC) settings we couldn't do anything to try to perfectly stabilize the Vcore, but nevertheless the results were quite decent. While the Vcore was at 1.352V most of the time, it did occasionally go down to 1.341V, it would often up to 1.363V, and sometimes up to 1.375V. So not perfectly steady, but there were no serious spikes and clearly it didn't affect our overclock.

Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the BIOS and the Windows power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter. For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter. For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 on all available threads while simultaneously loading the GPU with 3DMark Vantage - Test 6 Perlin Noise.

Since this is the first Z370 motherboard reviewed that we have posted we have nothing to directly compare these numbers with. However, we can tell you that the N7 achieves some fantastic idle results, and some pretty mediocre load numbers. At the moment, with this 1.0.0 BIOS, the motherboard is basically always using its highest voltage setting under load. Essentially it's using the 4.7GHz Turbo voltage that is usually reserved for a single core and applying it to all cores, even when they are only running at 4.3GHz. We expect this issue to be fixed in a future BIOS version.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

It is not often that we get to review a motherboard from a new player in this market. In fact, there arguably hasn't been a new motherboard manufacturer since EVGA joined the fray with their first NVIDIA nForce-based motherboards back in 2005. We say arguably only because there's dozens of new fly-by-night operations selling shoddy motherboards on sites like AliExpress or even more recently Amazon, but they aren't worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as "proper" motherboard companies.

With the release of this new N7 motherboard, NZXT is attempting to join the ranks of legitimate motherboard companies...with a little help from manufacturing partner ECS. At first glance, they have done a commendable job. Glance is the key word here since the packaging, the presentation, and the motherboard itself are all quite aesthetically pleasing. The all-metal motherboard cover and minimalist design really make the N7 standout in an ocean of fairly garish gaming-centric motherboards. Arguably, this motherboard is an aesthetic play first and foremost, with a healthy sprinkling of fan management and add-on RGB LED lighting functionality.

The integrated GRID+ fan management feature and accompanying CAM utility are quite remarkable, allowing for automatic or manual control of nine independent fan channels. This is a killer feature for those want to perfectly tweak their system's cooling, and it is an impressive add-on given that the standalone six-channel GRID+ V3 retails for $50 USD.

However, the HUE+ RGB lighting feature is less impressive. While the level of control that HUE+ and CAM allows for is pretty fantastic - and it should be given that the standalone HUE+ unit usually retails for $60 USD - the N7 itself has zero onboard RGB LED lighting. Instead, NZXT elected to give users two 300mm RGB LED light strips, two 300mm LED extension cables, and two 500mm LED connection cables that could be used/placed as desired. However, a recent decision to lower the N7's price from $300 to $250 means that these accessories have been cut from the bundle. As a result, this leaves the N7 with zero native RGB LED lighting. Whether you like lighting or not, the simple fact of the matter is that the N7 now has one less feature than basically every other Z370 motherboard in this price range. This omission hurts the N7 particularly because it is such an aesthetic-focused product.

When it comes to connectivity, we ran into a few puzzling choices. While four SATA ports is sufficient for most people it is still an unusual choice given that the Z370 chipset natively supports up to six. There is perhaps an argument to be made that leaving out two ports is less confusing for novice users that might not know that when installing M.2 SSDs a motherboard often has to disable one or more SATA ports...but that's what the manual is for.

While the N7 supports up to nineteen overall USB ports, the lack of any USB Type-C or USB 3.1 Gen2 connectivity is difficult to accept in a high-end motherboard released in 2018. As we mentioned in the review, this automatically creates a point of criticism, which is something that a new manufacturer should try to avoid. You would also be increasingly hard pressed to find a motherboard in this price range that doesn't include some form of onboard wireless connectivity.

When it came time to overclock, we weren't surprised by the lack of any automatic overclocking feature. It is fairly hard to get right from scratch and it is not an area that NZXT (or ECS for that matter) have a ton of experience in. Thankfully, our manual overclocking efforts were fruitful, reaching the 5.0GHz mark with a Core i7-8700K and memory speeds of DDR4-3866. However, there were a few quirks to work around. For example, the Vcore can scale with the CPU frequency instead of remaining static, the BIOS tends up pick unusual voltage combinations when applying XMP profiles, and it also doesn't allow you to tweak the memory speed or timings when in XMP mode. There are also a bunch of BIOS settings that we have come to expect that were missing. This is all fixable though, and given that NZXT has proven to very open and response to feedback we fully expect that these issues will be ironed out.

Overall, the NZXT N7 is a solid first attempt. The most important question is does it make up for in style what it lack in substance and polish? The answer to that will vary from buyer to buyer. With the matte black and matte white options, the removable and colour customizable armour covers, the minimalist design, it really is a striking motherboard. And it is a striking motherboard with excellent fan control capabilities. Regrettably, its RGB LED lighting capabilities are powerful but unutilized from the factory, and it is a little lacking in the connectivity department.