MSI Z370I Gaming Pro Carbon Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Peter Donnell / 7 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC Mini-ITX motherboard is available now from most major retailers for around £160-170. That’s not cheap, but when you see the performance is rubbing shoulders with many similarly priced and full-size ATX motherboards, it’s pretty fantastic. It even managed to beat out and compete with more expensive motherboards, making it very appealing for those building a compact gaming system.

Overview

The Z370 range continues to impress and while there are few changes between these and their Z270 counterparts, we can’t knock the performance. Of course, most of the gains are courtesy of the new 6-core 8th Generation Intel CPUs, but the end result is still the same. Mini-ITX motherboards are fantastic for compact and portable gaming systems, and the latest from MSI is certainly one of the best we’ve ever tested.

Performance

While it did score the highest ever Z370 benchmark numbers we’ve ever had, it was certainly up there with the best. Size is clearly not a limiting factor here, and the chunky heat sinks help maintain the high performance even while overclocked to 5 GHz. If your main focus is blazing high FPS, then you’ll be very happy with what it has to offer.

Design

Performance is one part of the puzzle, but the motherboard is also quite stylish. It blends dark design with a few touches of carbon fiber for a sleek look. Of course, you can fire up the customisable RGB lighting to put your own touch on it with Mystic Light. Of course, if you have other Mystic Light hardware, you can sync everything up for added flair.

Added Value

An armoured PCIe slot, armoured DDR4 slots, chunky heatsinks, Audio Boost 4, Military Class 5 hardware, and powerful networking certainly sweeten the deal here. Of course, with M.2 support you can get blazing fast storage and use Optane drives to boost performance even further. Overall, this is easily one of the best mini-ITX motherboards on the market today.