The MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard Review
by Patrick MacMillan on September 21, 2017 9:00 AM ESTIntel's HEDT platform in recent times has always had a two CPU generation cadence. The last change was in August 2014, catering for Haswell-E and Broadwell-E, so with the recent launch of Skylake-X, it was time for a refresh: the new LGA 2066 socket and a new X299 chipset (together called Basin Falls), with the inevitable slew of new motherboards looking to capitalize on the margin-rich high-end desktop sector. For our first review, we are testing the X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC from MSI.
The MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC Overview
The ‘Gaming Pro Carbon AC’ has become MSI’s defacto top-end motherboard in its main consumer line for the past couple of generations, mirrored with the XPower Gaming for overclockers. The slight change in MSI’s lineup over the last few years, from their trio of Gaming, MPower and XPower lines, to this, has been subtle - most noticeable due to the lack of an MPower if I’m brutally honest. But there is one ribbon that now runs throughout MSI’s veins, whether it is in motherboards, laptops, GPUs, or anything else: the need to have Gaming in the title. Because it cranks in MSI’s newer gaming focus, and it works wonders for SEO.
The MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC was actually our first X299 motherboard in-house for the Skylake-X launch. We had an early ES sample using some unfinished styling that did the business for our review, but MSI sent us a retail version for a full analysis. This includes the removable plates on the heatsinks that MSI states can be replaced to aid in the aesthetic customisation of a system.
The big element to X299 over X99 is going to be in the additional features enabled by the chipset: by moving to 20+ PCIe 3.0 lanes available through the chipset, it means elements of modern high-end systems such as storage and networking can be enabled without sacrificing connectivity of the processor. For the X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC, this means dual PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots for storage, a U.2 slot also for storage, and enabling WiFi and USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) with a redriver for Type-C.
If there’s one metric that MSI has been pushing the last couple of years, it is the motherboard aesthetic. This means consistent, styled angled lines throughout the design using complementary angles for heatsinks and accents. The ‘Carbon’ part of the name refers to the carbon fiber styling on the heatsinks, but also because MSI wanted to give these models a fairly neutral color scheme of black and silver that can be accentuated through the use of RGB lighting. MSI works the neutral color scheme into some of its features: the PCIe and DRAM reinforcement is silver, and the M.2 shields to assist in thermal dissipation are black with angled lines.
As one of our first X299 motherboards in for review, we do not have much to compare it against. In our CPU testing, the MSI board implemented an enhanced turbo mode by default, giving the CPU extra performance than one might expect. This has a direct correlation on power consumption, with our 140W TDP processor pulling 166W at a default BIOS. Users should equip the motherboard with appropriate cooling.
Information on Intel's X299 and our other Reviews
With Intel's release of the Basin Falls platform, encompassing the new X299 chipset and LGA2066 socket, a new generation of CPUs called Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X were also released. The Skylake-X CPUs range from the Core i9-7800X, a hex-core part, all the way up to an 18-core Core i9-7980XE multitasking behemoth. Between the book-end CPUs are five others increasing in core count, as in the table below. The latter HCC models are set to be launched over 2H of 2017.
Skylake-X Processors | ||||||||
7800X | 7820X | 7900X | 7920X | 7940X | 7960X | 7980XE | ||
Silicon | LCC | HCC | ||||||
Cores / Threads | 6/12 | 8/16 | 10/20 | 12/24 | 14/28 | 16/32 | 18/36 | |
Base Clock / GHz | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.3 | 2.9 | 3.1 | 2.8 | 2.6 | |
Turbo Clock / GHz | 4.0 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.2 | |
Turbo Max Clock | N/A | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.4 | |
L3 | 1.375 MB/core | 1.375 MB/core | ||||||
PCIe Lanes | 28 | 44 | 44 | |||||
Memory Channels | 4 | 4 | ||||||
Memory Freq DDR4 | 2400 | 2666 | 2666 | |||||
TDP | 140W | 140W | 165W | |||||
Price | $389 | $599 | $999 | $1199 | $1399 | $1699 | $1999 |
Board partners have launched dozens of motherboards on this platform already, several of which we will have an opportunity to look over in the coming weeks and months. This specific review will cover the MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC.
Other AnandTech Reviews for Intel’s Basin Falls CPUs and X299
- The Intel Skylake-X Review: Core i9-7900X, i7-7820X and i7-7800X Tested
- The Intel Kaby Lake-X Review: Core i7-7740X and i5-7640X Tested
- Intel Announces Basin Falls: The New High-End Desktop Platform and X299 Chipset
- ($390) The ASRock X299 Professional Gaming i9 Review [being edited]
- ($360) The MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon Review [this review]
- ($289) The ASRock X299 Taichi Review (upcoming)
To read specifically about the X299 chip/platform and the specifications therein, our deep dive into what it is can be found at this link.
X299 Motherboard Review Notice
If you’ve been following the minutiae of the saga of X299 motherboards, you might have heard some issues regarding power delivery, overclocking, and the ability to cool these processors down given the power consumption. In a nutshell, it comes down to this:
- Skylake-X consumes a lot of power at peak (150W+),
- The thermal interface inside the CPU doesn’t do much requiring a powerful CPU cooler,
- Some motherboard vendors apply Multi-Core Turbo which raises the power consumption and voltage, exacerbating the issue
- The VRMs have to deal with more power, and due to losses, raise in temperature
- Some motherboards do not have sufficient VRM cooling without an active cooler
- This causes the CPU to declock or hit thermal power states as to not degrade components
- This causes a performance drop, and overclocked systems are affected even more than usual
There has been some excellent work done by Igor Wallossek over at Tom’s Hardware, with thermal probes, thermal cameras and performance analysis. The bottom line is that motherboard vendors need to be careful when it comes to default settings (if MCT is enabled by default) and provide sufficient VRM cooling in all scenarios – either larger and heavier heatsinks or moving back to active cooling.
This means there are going to be some X299 boards that perform normally, and some that underperform based on BIOS versions or design decisions. We are in the process of quantifying exactly how to represent this outside of basic benchmarking, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we’re tackling our first X299 board of the season.
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sonny73n - Friday, September 22, 2017 - link
"Overclocking is done at your own risk and I see no reason why Intel should get taken to task over not supporting a person that by all rights should know they're trying to operate outside of the envelope to eek out a slightly higher benchmark score while reaping little to no real world benefit for all their effort and expenses"My i5 OCed to 5Ghz which is 26% performance gain over stock clock. Which means every time I use Handbrake to transcode my videos, I can save about 25% of my time and I do video encoding quite a lot. That's some real world benefit for me. Secondly, I don't see the need to upgrade my CPU every year nor having the money to do so. So, having a OC-able CPU is another benefit. That's why I bought a K series CPU instead of a non-K.
sonny73n - Friday, September 22, 2017 - link
By the way, there's no need for another obstacle between the CPU and HSF. I have never seen a CPU with lid in a laptop. So why not de-lid them?BrokenCrayons - Friday, September 22, 2017 - link
For home use, that's perfectly reasonable. You know the risks and you're accepting them and you're pinching a little extra life out of your system. In a production environment, overclocking is very uncommon because system life cycles are shorter and because time is money so new computers are purchased to gain that 25% back in increased productivity. Intel's primary customers are OEMs that sell to businesses and to non-overclocking home users. The fact that K processors even exist is only half-hearted nod to a small market segment in order to keep the most vocal parts of the enthusiast community from actively working to tarnish the company's brand name. It's important to them to acknowledge that group and appease it because doing so adds investment value versus the fairly low added costs of producing unlocked chips (for which they can charge premiums...nevermind the added "performance" chipset costs) but this is all about maximizing profits through playing up to the emotions of those few customers.sonny73n - Sunday, September 24, 2017 - link
With inadequate cooling and power in mobile devices, no sense to build them with unlocked CPUs. With desktop, most rational people would choose one with an unlocked CPU unless they don't see the needs for extra power. Because new CPUs performance only increase in average about 15% over previous generation, and likely sockets change for each gen especially with Intel, I'd rather get a system with an unlocked CPU to extend its usefulness. Home-build or pre-build, for home or office, there's not much of a difference if one has some common sense.Obviously you have very little knowledge about microprocessors, together with other computer components in general and how they work. You also have no clue about the CPU market nor common sense. Do you know that you can overclock your CPU with 1 click via MB UEFI?
BrokenCrayons - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
I don't understand the need to make personal attacks, but you can continue this conversation without my participation.prateekprakash - Thursday, September 21, 2017 - link
Wouldn't it be a nice feature to have the power and reset buttons in the rear io too; that way one may skip the front panel power/reset connections if one wishes to?DanNeely - Thursday, September 21, 2017 - link
nothing could be grander than accidentally hitting reset while fumbling around behind the case with a USB/etc cable trying to find a plug.CheapSushi - Friday, September 22, 2017 - link
As if you don't also have a USB port on the front of your case...next to the power & reset button too.... Nah, lets just find something to complain about.prateekprakash - Saturday, September 23, 2017 - link
Okay, then maybe a bios setting option to turn off the rear panel power/reset button, for those who would rather prefer front panel button...halcyon - Friday, September 22, 2017 - link
Are the DPC latency results really so varied on X299 platfrom? HardOCP got 81us for MSI X299 SLI Plus:https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/09/05/msi_x29...