MSI Z270 GAMING Pro Carbon review - A motherboard tested

MSI Z270 GAMING PRO Carbon
The budget friendly solution for the Kaby Lake platform 

For this review the turn goes to MSI. It is Z270 release day and in this article we cover the more budget oriented MSI Z270 GAMING Pro Carbon. Despite its friendly price-tag it has been loaded with features and has simply terrific looks. 

So, with the 7000 series processor (Kaby Lake) released, it's time for a peek at the motherboards based on Z270. We review the motherboard with a Core i5 7600K processor, that puppy is developed on the 14nm node. The Core i5 series processors are intended to be the more budget friendly offering from Intel, for a more mainstream consumer. For this review we look at the performance of this processor and motherboard in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations. Kaby Lake processors for the desktop platform have been released. Though you'd think it is an all new chip, it is however merely a respin seen from Skylake, meaning both series processors are Socket 1151. This also means that IF you are in the market for a new series 7000 processor, your H170 or Z170 motherboard can be compatible with Kaby Lake after a motherboard BIOS upgrade. The new series Kaby Lake processors are fairly energy efficient, still as powerful as they have been for years. If you are interested in new technologies like Intel Optane, you will however need to upgrade to a Z270 or H270 range motherboard. This new Z270 platform offers supports for Optane SSDs and offers support for slightly faster DDR4 memory.

 
 
MSI is outing the MSI Z270 GAMING Pro Carbon as an aesthetically pleasing product, nice dark looks with metal elements. Not too much LED bling aside for the logo and a LED strip (configurable) under the motherboard. You will not find hugely expensive Creative labs audio chips or an Intel Thunderbolt controller on this motherboard. No, everything seems and feels normalized, in line with good looks and features you need. By doing so, MSI is offering this motherboard at a pretty competitive price level, making your upgrade needs more budget friendly.

Budget or not, the motherboard does come with everything you need, may expect and then some more, like a carefully implemented (not over the top) mystic light RGB solution. You will also notice the new steel armor strips protecting the PCI-express slots and now also DIMM slots, two properly fast M.2 slots, audio boost based on Nahamic 2 and ASMedia 2142 controllers to offer full speed USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices. There is a lot more going on, what we like for example is that this motherboard offers a proper Intel Gigabit LAN connector. Lacking however is WIFI, which we feel is a bit of a miss. Armed with that Z270 chipset this motherboard offers three x16 slots and three 1x PCIe. Everything is and seems subtle. Let's get started with the actual review shall we?