MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

High-end motherboards like this don’t come cheap, and despite its smaller Micro-ATX form factor, the MSI X299 M Gaming Pro Carbon AC commands a full-size price tag. It’ll set you back around £280, which is a lot, but given the features on offer, the solid performance it’s certainly worth it. Obviously, with the cost of a CPU to make it worthwhile, the price of the motherboard is hardly a major concern as the bigger core chips can range from £1000 to £2000 with little change left over.

Overview

The latest gaming motherboard from MSI is a jack of all trades, with plenty of features to offer something useful to pretty much anyone. If you’re just going to use it for pure gaming, it’ll get the job done, but that’s not what this motherboard is really about. You could save a small fortune using the Z370 range of MSI motherboards, and the much more affordable 6-core CPUs that come with it. However, for the increasingly popular streaming market, the new 6 to 18 core offerings from Intel offer you a lot of freedom.

Multi-Tasking

If you’re running a game, multiple chat applications, rendering a stream, actually streaming video feeds and audio feed, overlay effects, and much more, then more CPU cores are going to pay off in a big way. Forget sacrificing your framerates, or putting up with sub-par quality, stuttering, or any of that nonsense. If you want everything live, everything now, and everything at max quality and 4K, then X299 is a solid investment, albeit not a cheap one.

4K and VR

This is true for other “extreme” ends of the gaming spectrum, so high-end 4K gaming workloads, VR, and even more so, gaming development suites, can all benefit from the higher core count. This is pushed further by the support for all kinds of high-end and super fast storage, including U.2, M.2, USB 3.1 and more.

Rendering and Beyond

Regarding performance, this is certainly one of the fastest X299 motherboards, and it’s hardly going to hold you back in any task. When it came to the heavy-duty number crunching required to encode 4K video, it made light work of the task. Of course, if you’re adding in a few M.2 drives, dual graphics cards and more to build a more work-station-like system, you can expect that performance to improve even further.

Added Value

I love that you’re able to “mod” the design with the included clip-on kit, or even 3D print and mount your own accessories. However, it’s things like the ALC1220 audio, RGB lighting, dual LAN and built-in Wi-Fi that tick all the right boxes for me. This isn’t a cheap product, and it’s great to see that MSI hasn’t skimped on the features you can use every day.

Pros

• Robust gaming performance
• Easy to overclock
• Dual LAN and Built-in WiFi
• High-end audio performance
• Dual M.2
• RGB lighting
• On board controls for power/bios
• Debug LED
• Great for content creators
• Armoured PCIe and M.2 mounts.

Cons

• None

Neutral

• Heat sink on CPU VRM looks small but got the job done just fine
• Only one M.2 has a Shield
• Only two of three PCIe is armoured

MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard Review