MSI MPG Z690 Carbon WiFi Motherboard Preview

Motherboard Overview

The Carbon is one great looking motherboard, sticking with a black and dark grey design that’s sure to look great in any system build. Plus, as the name suggests, there’s a Carbon Fiber design on part of the lower heatsink and the rear I/O cover. This is a high-end board though, and as you can see, it comes with a pretty significant amount of armour and huge heatsinks covering pretty much every major component, albeit, that does make the board rather heavy too.

MSI has equipped this board with an 18+1+1 Direct Power Design, that uses a 75A Smart Power Stage, so it should be pretty capable when it comes to boosting CPU clocks and manual overclocking. Furthermore, it’s got some pretty hefty heatsinks too, with a larger one to the left of the CPU. However, there’s a thick heatpipe that joins the two to ensure an even heat dissipation.

The CPU draws power from a pair of 8-pin headers, with the second one helping to provide more stable voltages for those pushing more high-end CPUs and bigger overclocks.

There are four DDR5 DIMMS on this board, and while some Z690 boards still use DDR4 slots, keep in mind they’re not forward/backwards compatible, so be sure your Z690 board of choice has the right slots and right RAM!

In the top right corner, you’ll find a BIOS debug LED, which is always handy!

The lower section features some pretty significant heatsinks, providing cooling for the main chipset and protecting quite a large portion of the PCB too. However, under them, you’ll find four M.2 Gen4 x4 slots, as well as a single Gen3 x4 slot which will also support Optane drives. For further storage, you’ll find six SATA 3 ports too, which should be plenty!

This board is one of the few to feature more than one PCIe Gen 5 slot, both of which are armoured too, so they’ll sustain the wait of chunky GPUs more easily. There are no Gen 5 graphics cards just now, but this would certainly future proof you for upcoming expansion cards. There’s also a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot at the bottom, should you need it.

The rear I/O looks fantastic, offering a huge amount of USB ports, with four USB 2.0 at the top, then five USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps ports below that, and even a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps Type-C port. Networking comes from both the Intel 2.5 GbE LAN, as well as the latest Intel WiFi 6, so you’ll have no issues getting the best out of your internet/network! Finally, there are five audio jacks, as well as an SPDIF.