Keep in mind that the X870 chipset is the flagship chipset for the new motherboards, so all of these are regarded as high-end motherboards. However, there are of course more affordable X870 and more premium X870 motherboards in this launch, with the largest variance being increased VRM, which is paired with larger VRM cooling solutions, which increases the price. The number of M.2 mounts, USB ports, and networking, for example, will all increase the price too. Unfortunately, we don’t have UK pricing for these boards at the time of writing but will update that with retail links as soon as they’re available sometime after we publish these reviews.
If these are too expensive for you, there will be more affordable B-series motherboards coming, but we suspect these will be revealed at CES 2025 and launch in Q1 2025, if you can wait that long, if not, then the X-series boards are clearly some of the best options right now for those building an AMD focused build.
This is a major chipset launch for AMD, so there are dozens of new X870 motherboards hitting the market today. Of course, we’ve been very busy testing 9 of them for you, and they’re all linked below, so if the one in this review isn’t quite meeting your needs, there’s plenty more to choose from! Largely, all being the same chipset, with the same AMD 9950X CPU being used for our testing, we expect the majority of the benchmarks to be broadly the same, with perhaps small differences in some of them. Largely, the price and performance of each motherboard are dictated by the additional features. Such as more PCIe slots, more M.2 mounts in Gen3, Gen4, or Gen5, more high-speed USB ports, more cooling hardware, etc. Largely, we recommend buying a motherboard that meets your current component requirements, with a little overhead for future upgrades; a spare M.2 slot for example.
The MSI Carbon series is well known for being built for enthusiast gamers, creatives and streamers, and this new one is no exception. There’s a strong focus on extreme performance here, with the massively upgraded VRM configuration being one of the most potent out of any of the X870 motherboards we’re reviewing today. More power, more cooling, and overall just better quality components will ensure you can max out your CPU while gaming, rendering videos, or any other demanding task, and have peace of mind it isn’t going to overheat and throttle.
The same is true on the M.2 mounts, they’re all ready to support the latest and greatest Gen4 and Gen5 drives, with big heat sinks to keep them cool. There’s a more robust PCIe slot design, quick-release controls for all the mounts, and BIOS-level technologies such as Lightning Gen 5 to ensure you can tune everything for extreme performance.
As you might expect, being such a high-end board, it makes no compromises on connectivity, with 2.5 GbE and 5 GbE LAN making it well suited to hooking up to your home network/NAS, as well as super-fast fibre internet, and there’s even the latest WiFi 7 too for exceptional wireless performance. You get the latest USB4 and Type-C technologies and plenty more USB ports for all your peripherals.
Gamers, streamers, content creators, overclocking enthusiasts and anything else in between will find a lot to love about this motherboard, it’s got a lot of everything for everyone.
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