MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard Review

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Very little is new about the X99 PCH chipset (Wellsburg) of course, what what triggered the release of the updated series is a direct effect of Intel's choice to re-use that LGA Socket 2011. The chipset itself offers all that is needed of course, but remains more of the same. This is why the motherboard manufacturers did their absolute best to make things a little different. An X99 based motherboard as such remains enthusiast class hardware that now can be paired with Broadwell-E processors, seriously fast clocked DDR4 memory, you'll have M2 SSD capabilities at proper speeds (yeah I do call 2500 MB/sec a proper speed lol!) and obviously some niche things like the U2 connected, SATA Express alongside board designs, RGB lighting and subtle improvements otherwise. The  MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard is really a terrific product to work with from A to Z. See re-using that X99 platform also means that the hardware is refined and tweaked. That shows in for example the memory results you have seen. It also makes tweaking (overclocking) far more easy as MSI will do the difficult things for you already (albeit Broadwell-E processors are not extremely tweakable). The MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon certainly is a feature rich motherboard. I do think that MSI did skimp a little on Ethernet options, just one Gigabit jack (albeit a proper Intel one) is all that is offered. The missing thing for me is AC WIFI. A big miss for a 329 USD / 300 Euro product IMHO. 


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Aesthetics

Overall the MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon is just an incredibly appealing looking motherboard and really has it all including some terrific looks with the black chrome / carbon design and the fully configurable RGB LED lighting system. Looks obviously remain personal and I am a sucker for the all matte black combo with LED configuration. Very stylish also is that PCH chipset heatsink with the aura of LEDs under it, just lovely. Add to that the RAW horsepower a Haswell-E/Broadwell-E platform delivers. Yeah, its cool stuff alright. Yeah, it is just an intriguing product to look at really. Just sheer awesomeness in a dark PC case. The LEDs create an awesome HALO coming from under the shielding, it makes the motherboard pop out of your system. Well visually that is. The PCB is extremely dark as it has received a proper coated layer, including the dark connectors, dark capacitors, with the subtle heatsinks this rocks my boat. This is just a great looking solution for the enthusiast PC gamer. 
  

 The Platform Experience

The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that ever since 2014/2015 the best years for motherboards did arrive, look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice but is at the level of pretty much any old Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 3.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.5 GHz per core for the Core i7 6950X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E/Broadwell-E will make nice difference. Added to that, quad-channel DDR4 memory will offer retarded bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes and you'll have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus. With this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great lengths and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really. The latest iteration of the MSI Click BIOS uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. Apply a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get over that 4000 MHz range with a capable enough processor. 

Features

Specs and features wise there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be the infrastructure for your SLI or Crossfire setup. What more would you need?  Well, I mentioned the lack of AC WIFI, a big miss. You do get everything else though, no less than ten 6 Gbps SATA 3 ports and that sweet M.2 interface on a 32 Gbps link. Then a hideous amount of USB 3.0 ports are included as well as  3.1 USB jacks, of course we need to mention the enhanced audio solution as well. I really do have to complement the audio features here, as over the standard codecs used like two years ago, we now see huge improvement on both hard and software side that is way more appealing to the audiophile. Combined with ten SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly complain about anything. Interesting I find to be the developments on the M.2 interface, pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 2500 MB/sec range. Overall your SATA and M2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance. 

 
 

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Tweaking

If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking then just press the OC Genie II button, power up and after a few seconds your motherboard will all of the sudden be mildly overclocked, a performance boost at very little extra power consumption as the CPU will now be throttled to 3800 MHz; admittedly a bit low. The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected. Realistically at 1.33 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 6950X at roughly 4300 MHz on all cores. All ten of them. The CPUs run hot though, too hot. Overall we'd recommend you to stick at 4.0 GHz at 1.2 Volts (but that is just a little tip). Also make sure you use liquid cooling if you plan to tweak of course. Overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, contrary the this board was designed to offer all features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise. Memory wise, really you are not going to notice any benefit of extremely fast clocked memory. More 2133 MHz DDR4 DIMMs setup in quad-channel will benefit you great then faster. Still if you are a performance monger, just have a peek at the memory benchmarks in this article, the 3200 MHz activated XMP DIMMs from G.Skill offer a truckload of bandwidth at quad-channel.

 

 

Final Words

The MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard is simply super sexy. It's feature rich, has an incredible nice dark design and is well built with top notch components. I do have to say this, and it is the brutal truth, we have tested many X99 motherboards by now, and they all perform roughly the same and they all overclock roughly the same if you stick to a consumer grade cooler like an AIO liquid cooling kit. So you need to seek value, design or features as it remains these three factors that matter most. MSI certainly is doing such a good job in all these segments. Combined with a relatively energy friendly and feature rich X99 chipset these platforms will perform just excellent. Features wise aside from WIFI this kit offers it all, the ten SATA 6 Gbps ports, the Intel Ethernet jacks and the 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec. The motherboard is multi-GPU ready and then add to all this features like on-board buttons, pre-overclock modes and diagnostic LEDs, fantastic design and configurable RGB LED lit heatsinks, enthusiast class Broadwell-E / Haswell-E processor platform, USB 3.1, SATA3, PCI-E Gen 3.0, ease of tweaking and sure, the design and component selection. This list goes on and one. I have very little to comment or complain about, except maybe pricing (329 USD) and the lack of WIFI. But other than that, all that excellence in build quality and features merge together in a fantastic design to the eyes, the MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard is easily on my top three of best looking motherboards (albeit taste is personal). It is a top pick alright, nice .. very nice.

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