Product Photos
The C9Z390-CG-IW comes in a quite small box which contains everything we may need for the motherboard installation and some more.
Inside we can find cables, drivers DVD, stickers for data cables, I/O shield, SATA data cables and extension for front panel which is really handy in tight PC cases.
The motherboard overall looks really clean, There are quite small heatsinks which are enough to keep the power section safe. I only wish to see chipset heatsink which could cool NVMe SSD as some of them are getting really hot and we could see cooling solutions on competitive motherboards so it’s for sure possible.
Power design is based on 7 phases which should be able to deliver enough power for higher overclocked CPU and memory. In our tests, we had no problems to achieve 5.3GHz using the i7-9700K processor so all eight cores. Our cooler gave up at this frequency but I’m sure that motherboard can make more.
For sure some users will be happy to see two full speed M.2 sockets as not many mini ITX motherboards offer that. Recently prices of M.2 SSD are low enough to replace typical SATA SSD and HDD. It also saves a lot of space and we don’t need additional cables. One M.2 socket is in the front and one on the back of the motherboard.
The C9Z390-CG-IW is also equipped with high-speed dual-band Intel WiFi controller and Bluetooth 5.0 and multiple USB 3.1 ports. Pretty much everything we may need in a small gaming PC.
We can’t forget about additional features like RGB LED lighting which is in a form of multiple RGB LEDs installed on the back of the motherboard but close enough to the edge so it brightens the center of the PC. To other features, I can add strengthened PCIe and memory slots. Not really required but it’s always a nice sight.
No matter how well built would be a motherboard, it won’t work without BIOS so on the next page we will take a closer look at the BIOS/UEFI of the C9Z390-CG-IW.
