Reviews MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC Review

So it costs £200 less than the Asus, overclocks slightly easier (lower voltages), has a fan to blow air over the VRM heatsink and RAM...

This is fantastic value and should light a fire underneath Asus pretty quick. For the performance freak (they are buying Threadripper, so they are one by definition ) this cost saving could either stretch their hardware to a 1950X or to another 500GB in the m.2 SSD department.

As for the audio performance, if someone was so bothered by it... they'd get/have an expansion card. A good compromise.

 

On the X299 and X370 platform also MSI shows really strong performance against the top Asus offerings.
See the reviews of the X299 carbon for example, or the MSI X299 M7 ACK one.
Or the X370 titanium.
Also in UK some retailers sell the X299 it with the MSI voucher to get a 240mm AIO for free, worth £100. So not only is cheaper by few hundred pounds, has a further discount (if you sell the AIO).
While is faster!

 

MSI knocks it out the park yet again. I love MSI products and this is one of the reasons why.

 

Nice board. Very nice board.

 

I'm sorry, but any motherboard that is £340 cannot be Fantastic Value, it just shows you how overprices the other boards are.. £340 for a board is beyond a joke.

 

It's relative isn't it? It's 40% cheaper than comparable competition. As for its absolute cost of £340, ok, technology (especially HEDT) is expensive... but imagine how bad it would be if it tracked the Freddo price index.

 

Plz dont. You bring back memories of me being able to buy 5 with my 50p a week tuck shop money at prep school.

TBH, a DFI SLi NF4 Ultra-D was ~£150 in 2005, freddo index would make it £450 now...

 

Not really, the competition are the AsRock X399 Taichi, the Asus Prime X399-A and the Gigabyte X399 Gaming 7.
The Asus Zenith Extreme and the AsRock X399 Fatality are in a different price league due to including comically expensive 10 Gigabit Lan.

 

Annoyingly, higher prices are common these days... but you need to remember just what goes into producing a motherboard of such calibre. There are test runs, minimum production allowances and all sorts that you'd never even think of. Yes, 340 quid is costly... but it isn't going to be sold for a loss to the company (or at least not a major loss, you know, loss leader and all that...)

 

Been running this board for a couple of weeks, it’s BIOS interface is a little clunky compared to my ASUS stuff but it gets the job done, the little fan adder is such a nice little thing, I never knew I needed until I had one, the board has quite nice behaviour when it fails due to aggressive memory settings, nearly always coming back to default setting after a couple of boot loops so you can tweak it back, when it doesn’t manage, the clear CMOS on back plate is very handy indeed.

Not mentioned in the review but It’s quite annoying that the PCI Wifi thing requires a USB header on the motherboard for Bluetooth, Wifi works fine if you don’t use it but there aren’t many internal USB2 headers, once I have plugged in my front 2.0 ports and Bluetooth you are done, no room for my case LCD, you could argue that I have USB3 ports and perhaps I don’t need the others but I don’t like dead ports on my case.

There are cheap solutions to this I have internal USB3 to USB2 header adaptor as well as extras hubs that plug in to give internal boost, so that was an additional cost adder only a couple of quid but other wise happy

Wouldn’t really care about them using a 1 slot for wifi, once I’ve converted my GPUs to water they are able to become single slot cards leaving space for that sort of thing, extra external sata/wifi/whatever. It’s just a shame that single slot adaptors aren’t provided or readily available for every card, quite niche I suppose.

But really all those external USB ports and they can't think to add this stuff (Wifi/BT) as a USB dongle?

 

Interesting, I was looking at the review numbers to see how mine compares and a lot of your numbers seem off or I am perhaps not comparing the same thing, article suggests defaults and that they should be comparable.

I only have the 1900x with half the cores and my time spy CPU test at stock is 8343 and OC'd 9245 So I'd expect your 1950X to be much stronger, similar thing with the photos and AoS one but having not bought that I can be sure hardware disabled effects anything.

Its like you are running on a 3rd of the chip.

 

NVMe Raid BIOS was released the other week, so it was rude not too

 

No updates for years but happened to be browsing msi to check spec on my board and see they have released a Resizable BAR option, now if only I could get a GPU.

 

Oo nice shout. I have one of these too.