MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC review - Introduction

MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon / AC
A truly excellent choice for X399 moterherboards.

For our next Ryzen Threadripper motherboard review we move to MSI, they have released their X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC. The board is stylish, comes with very subtle LED effects and obviously offers everything you need from quadruple x16 PCI-Express slots, triple M2 SSD slots, quad-channel memory and some really supreme AC WIFI. 

Threadripper processors do not only offer many CPU cores and threads, they also offer quad channel memory compatibility as well as 64 PCI-Express Generation 3.0 lanes on the processor alone. That last fact opens up a tremendous amount of possibilities for any motherboard manufacturer, as restrictions are lifted since there is plenty of bandwidth to work with. Well, leave it up-to these guys to design something intricate and tasteful, they designed a motherboard that is going completely off the chart when we talk features. Triple M2 SSDs (full x4 PCie gen 3), a U2 connector, how about eight DIMM channels. You will spot many PCIE connectors, USB 3.1 ports as well as an abundance of storage options. This 16 cores and 32 threaded Threadripper ready motherboard shows once again that massive SP3/TR4 slot.

Much like all other X399 motherboards, MSI as well offers mounts for no less than three M2 SSDs combined with audio based upon a Realtek ALC 1220 CODEC. MSI is embedding one GigaLAN Intel I211AT jack into the board and sure, a bit of RGB LEDs as well (albeit very subtle and configurable). The CPU can be powered by 8+8 pin power connectors. The board has four PCI-Express x16 slots and an array of OC buttons as well as a diagnostic POST LED. Since X399 will bring support of up-to 64 PCIe Gen3 lanes bringing anything and everything multi-GPU support multi-GPU into play, including full-on quad GPU support, the spacing on the mobo does support it. 

Unfortunately, MSI did not implement any Aquantia AQC-107 LAN chip can be spotted, a bit of a miss for such a high-end product ling term wise. They do however offer 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac + BT4.2 Wireless Ethernet by an AC add-in card. It's the good stuff, based on an Intel AC 8265 chip. You'll spot a nice design with that dark and carbon feel to it. The X399 board can be spotted for roughly € 389,- / 349 USD. Let's head onwards into the review, shall we? Have a peek first though.