A Closer Look
MSI has gone above and beyond with the aesthetics of their latest Carbon motherboard, although in fairness, all the previous Carbon boards were pretty handsome too. There’s a range of huge heatsinks all finished in jet black, on a black PCB, with all black fittings throughout. There are only a few touches of silver from the socket and PCIe slots, but largely, they’ll be hidden once you’ve installed your hardware anyway, giving it a nearly all-black design.
There’s an ARGB dragon and ARGB Carbon logo on here too, which you can turn off or have any colour you like, so that’s a nice little touch. However, aesthetics aside, there’s a very impressive 18+2+1 Digital VRM design here, which puts it firmly into the enthusiast overclocking bracket, so maxing out any of the latest CPUs should be a breeze.
There is a dedicated heatsink from the primary Gen5 M.2, and it comes with MSI’s EZ M.2 CLIP II mounting system for easy installation. There are also large heatsinks over the bottom half of the board, under which you’ll find even more M.2 mounts, as well as an upgraded PCH heatsink to ensure everything is running optimally.
Around the back, you get plenty of ultra-fast connectivity, with the latest USB4 Type-C technology, both 2.5 GbE and 5 GbE LAN, as well as WiFi7. I love that they’ve included three control buttons too, for Bios Flash, CMOS, and a programmable Smart Button that can be configured in the BIOS.
