Supermicro is not your run-of-the-mill manufacturer but has activated in the hardware server business for quite a bit and have been recognized as only using high-quality and durable components with their releases. Recently, the company has also started to produce motherboards for the gaming workstations, allowing the use of Skylake processor series along with non-ECC DDR4 memory. The sample we are going to take a look from this new series is the C7Z170-OCE which is shipped inside a custom-designed cardboard enclosure, imitating brushed aluminum on the top layer:

After removing the top layer, we will end up with the name of the motherboard in center, written on an all-black background:

The interior box contents try to follow the motherboard layout color scheme which is black and green; the motherboard is fully wrapped inside an anti-static bag for additional protection:

The accessories are placed on the bottom layer; here we will find no less than six red SATA cables (we would prefer these to be green in order to keep a consistent color scheme), the I/O shield, mounting screws for the M.2 storage and also an installation disk:

We also have a quick installation guide to our disposal which shows us the motherboard schematic along with the pin placement of the headers in order to make our assembly job easier. If this is not enough for us, we can always use the fully-fledged manual found on the driver CD but also online, on the product web page:

After seeing the C7Z170-OCE PCG for the first time we have had a flashback regarding the older DFI overclocking boards, which have had a similar color scheme; despite this is one of Supermicro’s first attempts at overclocking boards, we do find the hardware layout quite clean and with plenty of jumpers in order to enable/disable some features on a hardware level, without the need of entering inside the UEFI:

The VRM around the CPU socket is covered by themed black/green aluminum heatsinks, while the I/O area is shielded too. This motherboard does feature a digital 6+2+1+1 power phase design, six phases being dedicated for the CPU, the two for the iGPU and the last 1+1 for the VCCSA and VCCIO:

Near the memory slots and the top VRM heatsink we do have one CPU fan header: