MSI Z370I Gaming Pro Carbon Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

Straight away, the latest mini-ITX motherboard from MSI is showing its worth. It scored 23189 in 3DMark at stock, and pushed to 23862 once overclocked. Not our fastest time ever, but it’s certainly not far from the top!

Stock

Overclocked

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

PCIe throughput is clearly not an issue either, with the GTX 1080 Ti hitting 5551 and 5531 in Unigine.

Stock

Overclocked

PCMark 10 Express

This benchmark loves Intel CPUs, and the new 6 core 8th Gen CPUs certainly perform well. The MSI motherboard hit 6238 and 6586 once overclocked. Overall, that’s our third highest score to date!

Stock

Overclocked

WPrime 32M and 1024M

The good numbers just keep on rolling in, with the stock time of 107 being taken to just 100.202 once overclocked. Sure, it’s not as number crunch happy as the Ryzen or Threadripper CPUs and motherboards, but it’s pretty darn fast for a consumer mini-ITX configuration.

Stock

Overclocked

Cinebench R15

The increased core count, the fast memory support and Optane are all big helps for Z370, and the latest MSI motherboard had no issues hitting a respectable 1638 once overclocked. That’s one of the lower scores for Z370, but still competitive.

Stock

Overclocked

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

Again, a competitive score, with all of the Z370 motherboards performing about the same in this regard.

Stock

Overclocked