MSI Z170A GAMING PRO CARBON (LGA1151) Review

CPU & GPU Performance

Cinebench

At stock settings, the motherboard managed the best single benchmark score thus far and just edged the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7.

Once overclocked, there was a marked increase in performance and upheld its positioned during single core testing. While it fell slightly behind in multi-core compute, the difference remained extremely small.

WPrime

In WPrime, the results paint a similar picture, and I was very impressed with the Z170 GAMING PRO CARBON’s performance.

The overclock results are evenly matched and there’s not a lot to distinguish between the top scores. Although, it’s clear that the motherboard is a very good performer in CPU workloads.

SiSoft Sandra

At first glance, the motherboard appears to struggle in this particular test, but the charts can be deceiving. This is because there’s only a difference of 1 point between second place and six place. Therefore, the gap is minimal and continues the trend of good CPU performance across various tasks.

After the overclock was applied, the Z170A GAMING PRO CARBON marches ahead and remains within one point of the top spot. The gap between its positioning and the similarly priced ASUS Z170 PRO GAMING.

3DMark

3DMark performance is typically GPU bound and improvements revolve around driver updates from NVIDIA. However, it’s a handy stress test to see the motherboard’s capabilities during gaming scenarios. As you can see, the Z170A GAMING PRO CARBON did extremely well and almost attained first position.

Tomb Raider

In Tomb Raider, the motherboard was tantalizingly close to reaching 101 frames-per-second at 1440P and demonstrated excellent numbers during 1920×1080 testing.

Bioshock Infinite

The data in Bioshock Infinite isn’t very consistent and down to some irregularities between various driver updates. Regardless, the Z170A GAMING PRO CARBON still maintained a superb figure of 110.300 FPS while running the 1440P benchmark.