MSI Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON LGA1151 Review

John Williamson / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Unfortunately, there’s been a complete lack of information regarding the Z270 motherboards and their retail prices. As a result, it’s impossible to conduct a fair comparison between numerous products and assess the value proposition. Rest assured, once the full Z270 range is available to purchase, I’ll be adding the appropriate links and revisiting the pricing analysis. According to my sources, it’s likely vendors will add approximately £10-£30 compared to the previous generation. However, this doesn’t help matters when a company unveils something completely new and the predecessor can’t be researched to gauge a pricing estimate. Honestly, I’d expect more details to emerge during CES when PR contacts return from the holiday break.

Overview

The MSI Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON employs an elegant visual style in the form of a matte black theme and carbon fibre inspired overlays. This combines to create a gorgeous effect and ensure the motherboard has its own distinctive appearance. The neutral colour scheme has a wide appeal while the carbon fibre accents add a sense of luxury without being overly lavish. MSI like many other vendors settled for a more understated design and allowed the end-user to inject colour through RGB illumination. Interestingly, MSI’s Mystic Light technology is very impressive and appears much brighter than the ASUS counterpart. In particular, the lighting around the DIMM slots is incredible as the light emanates from underneath the PCB. Of course, you can select from a huge range of visual effects or opt for a single colour. Personally, I quite like how the lighting is embedded into the PCH and clearly shows the I/O cover’s text. Additionally, you can attach a LED strip directly to an onboard header and control the lighting using MSI’s software.

As expected, MSI utilised a plethora of high-grade components including an 11-phase power delivery, titanium chokes with a 220 degrees maximum rating and 10K capacitors. Not only that, PCB has a double layer grounding around the mounting holes to protect against surges, leading to a longer product lifespan. Also, there are six 4-pin PWM headers supporting hysteresis which makes RPM values change on a more gradual curve. MSI incorporated a 2A water pump header designed to run at 100% full duty. The company’s exclusive VR chip boosts the signal of the VR-branded USB ports which reduces jitter. On another note, the memory has its own isolated circuitry and MSI invests a great deal of time testing different memory configurations for compatibility. The DIMM slots and two PCI-E x16 slots have Steel Armor shielding to uphold a cleaner signal and protect against electrical overcurrent.

The motherboard’s audio hardware is based on the Realtek ALC1220 codec and has a dedicated isolation path, EMI cover, Chemicon capacitors and de-pop protection circuitry. As a result, the audio clarity is excellent across different bit-rates although the latency could be improved upon. The MSI Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON has an ASmedia 2142 USB 3.1 Gen2 controller which delivers USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C connectivity. There’s also two M.2 connectors which can be combined to reach astonishing speeds. Prior to the review, I was extremely excited by the M.2 shield and thought it was a masterstroke. However, the M.2 read performance wasn’t good and lingered behind the competition. Despite running different benchmarking programs and trying multiple runs, the results didn’t really change. Honestly, I do think the M.2 Shield has a valid purpose and there must have been some bizarre reason for lacklustre read rate. As a result, I’m prepared to revisit the M.2 Shield after CES and try a different drive. Another interesting addition is the XBOOST software which enhances the storage performance by a decent margin. I didn’t see this myself because the SATA speeds were at the interface’s limitation and the same goes for USB 3.0.

MSI’s Click BIOS 5 is fantastic and the default mode lists all the key system read-outs on a single page. Not only that, the Game Boost button allows you to enjoy a higher CPU frequency without any effort or technical know-how. Those who enjoy tweaking every aspect of their system can employ the Advanced mode which houses an impressive array of settings to adjust the VCCIO, Vcore, PCH voltage and much more. The BIOS contains a wonderful board explorer, hardware monitor and fan calibration tool. Updating the BIOS is a really simple task and due to the slick user-interface. MSI’s software is probably the best on the market and useful to enhance system performance, modify the motherboard’s lighting and even create a RAMDisk.

When it comes to performance, the motherboard is a great all-around option and consistently achieves commendable results. While it’s not able to top the charts, this doesn’t really matter given the tiny difference. This is a common theme because you shouldn’t base the purchasing decision for a Z270 product on tight performance charts. Instead, it’s better to analyse the colour scheme and core features. The MSI Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON delivers superb performance apart from the M.2 read rate. Hopefully, this will be resolved and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something to do with an unlucky sample. Overall, the motherboard’s visual style is stunning and the feature list will be more than the enough to please the core gaming demographic.

Pros

Comprehensive software suite
Dedicated water pump header supporting up to 2.A
DDR4 Boost
Dual M.2 NVMe ready
Excellent BIOS layout packed with features
Gorgeous, elegant design
Great audio hardware
Innovative VR chip reduces jitter
M.2 Shield has lots of potential despite mediocre results
Metal shielding
Premium components
Six PWM controlled fan headers with hysteresis
Spectacular RGB lighting system
Supports USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C

Cons

Disappointing M.2 read speeds

“The MSI Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON sports a really sophisticated aesthetic design which is taken to new heights by the astonishing Mystic Light RGB illumination. Not only that, the motherboard supports the USB 3.1 standard, has dual M.2 connectivity, a wonderful BIOS and a huge array of other innovative features which makes it one of the best Z270 products you can buy.”

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