The MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC is here, will it race ahead of the competition or suffer from an overheated engine!?
The new AMD Ryzen 2000 series CPUs are here and they've picked up right from where their extremely impressive and successful Ryzen 1000 counterparts had left. Ofcourse these CPUs as AMD had promised are backward compatible to the same AM4 socket on the existing X370 and B350 chipset motherboards but then some new features such as XFR 2.0 and Precision Boost 2 that these bring to the table require a new motherboard chipset only and only if one is planning to build a new system from scratch. So here we are today with the new X470 PCH motherboards flooding the market and even though they are technically the same as their X370 counterparts these offer some new tits and bits and not to mention much more refined and revamped aesthetics. Thanks to MSI today we I'm publishing my first ever review of these new motherboards and I'm super excited as this is my favorite lineup of the MSI lot, we have with us today the MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard for review!
Since some time now the Gaming Pro Carbon lineup has been the mainstream king from MSI and has always proved its worth both in Intel and AMD sides alike, to be honest I've not come across a single one of these that weren't worth the money so, my hope are already high here! With a price tag of $180 this is one of the cheaper X470 motherboards out in the market with enough RGB, dual M.2 slots, a robust VRM and plenty of IO options including a WiFi adapter from Intel!
What's in the Box!?
MSI has a different color scheme for each of its motherboard range and the same goes for the Carbon series motherboards that pretty much like its previous generations is, well mostly black with hues of colors signifying its RGB nature.
The front doesn't have much to divulge in terms of feature set nor has an image of the motherboard instead the entire real estate is occupied by a dark and mystical image of the IO cover so bye bye to the god old sports car!
The back unlike the front is printed to the brim with features! A detailed marked diagram of the motherboard is printed in one corner highlighting all the physical features and on the right we see features such as the Mystic LED, Twin Turbo M.2, USB 3.1 briefly explained.
Open the box and you'll find the motherboard in an anti-static bag resting on top of the bottom compartment that houses all the accessories.
On the accessories front the X470 Pro Carbon AC is quite humble yet provides all the accessories needed to get one started. We have a WiFi Antenna installation guide, User’s manual, Cable labels, Driver and utility DVD, Quick installation guide, Registration insert, SLI HB Bridge, USB 2.0 header extension cable, I/O Shield, Two SATA cables, 2 x WiFi Antennae, Screw for PCIe card, Rainbow RGB LED Extension cable 80cm and Y-splitter RGB LED Extension cable 80cm.
Closer Look and Features
MSI went low key with this one over here aswell. Simply placing the motherboard out of the box shows the stark reality that the motherboard is indeed different from what the usual trend is going on in the motherboard market today.
The X470 Gaming Pro Carbon is one of the few motherboards out there that shout elegance from every corner! Its a full matte black product with highlights of carbon fiber vinyl on the I/O shield, PCH while certain areas are highlighted by white plastic cover accentuated by metal strips and underlying LEDs that can be used as per one's own whims.
Looking at the CPU socket area we realize that it is extremely clean and specious with ample space to accommodate big air coolers aswell. The socket right in the middle is a AM4 which is the same as that on the previous generation X370 and like boards. This makes the entire new AMD Ryzen 2000 series compatible with previous gen motherboards after a simple BIOS update and nothing else giving you more value for money!
DIMM slots on the reinforced by metal shields that not only work as an EMI shielding to the RAM sticks to ensure hindrance free performance but also imparts tensile strength to the slots in case one uses tall or heavy Memory kits like my Kingston HyperX Predator.
These support a maximum of 64GB DDR4 memory kit working at a maximum frequency of 3466Mhz. Also the mounting mechanism is changed and both the locking brackets need to be opened prior to DRAM installation.
Along the bottom of the motherboard are two of the eight SATA III ports strangely isolated from the other six located on the right side near the PCH which could make cable management tricky.
Turn your gaze towards the PCIe area and we see three PCIe 3.0x16 slots and three PCIex1 slots for devices of a bygone era! Two M.2 slots is also provided that we'll discuss later on.
Two of the three full sized PCIe slots are armored to support large and heavy graphics card while the bottom most is partially reinforced with metal clips for added support giving the board the following configuration in SLI or CrossFireX:
Single Card: 16x/0/0/
Dual: 8x/8x/0/
Tri: 8x/8x/4x/
The PCIe Slots have three LED embedded at the bottom and lit up red when the slot is populated by a graphics card. They turn up white when the graphics card installed is using less than 16xPCIe lane.
A notable fact over here is that in ATX board like this you tend to find seven PCIe slots in total with four full length and three PCIex1 but in the MSI X470 Gaming Pro there are only five eliminating the top most slot. By doing this MSI cleverly managed to shift the DIMM slots down by half an inch which in-turn cleared out some space in the CPU area and above it giving one the flexibility to choose from a range of beefy CPU air cooler without any compatibility issue.
We also see two M.2 ports here out of which the top one is shielded and has 4xPCIe3.0 lanes to it for full bandwidth of 32Gb/s but the one near to the bottom has only 2 PCIe lanes making ti usable for SATA drives as in case one uses a NVMe drive they'll only get half the speed there. Once populated with a SATA drive you will surrender one SATA III port while populating a NVMe drive in the top slot won't have any effect on other connectivity features.
For the IO panel we have two USB 2.0 and five USB 3.1 ports, one USB Type-C port, LAN port, audio output, one PS2 port, clear CMOS button, WiFi and Bluetooth antenna connection ports, a display port and an HDMI port.
Resolutions up to 1920×1200 at 60Hz are supported on the single-link DVI-D port, while HDMI offers 4K at a low refresh rate or lower resolutions (such as 1080P) at 60Hz.
On the left side of the board we have the Audio Boost 4 technology powered by a Realtek ALC 1220 5-channel CODEC which is an upgrade to the ALC 1150 used previously by most of the manufacturers and protect by an LED illuminated isolation strip to prevent any static distortion. This arrangement is solidified with gold plated Chemi-con capacitors and three Texas Instruments OP1562 op-amps to power headphones and provide a surround sound experience.
The CPU is powered by an 12+1 phase Military Class-5 power delivery system controlled by a NIKOS PK832BA PWM controller and constituted of 10-years rated Titanium Choke and Black Caps. This is not an all digital power delivery system but a reliable one for sure being powered by twin eight-pin EPS 12V connectors for enhanced stability and extreme overclocking, though one is fine with using any one of the two for daily use.
VCore and VccGT phases are handled by a IR 35201 3+2 phase PWM controller on this motherboard which is a good configuration and I expect to see some impressive and stable overclocking results delivered by the X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC.
Four ASMedia ASM1480 multiplexers are responsible for routing the PCIe lanes between the two silver x16 slots while some of the USB 3.0 and 3.1 USB ports on the board are controlled by the Asmedia ASM314 chip to shed load from the CPU and the Intel's I211AT Gigabit LAN controller is also in place to take care of the connectivity.
BIOS and Bundled Software
BIOS Overview
UEFI BIOS is getting more and more common with each manufacturer opting for it due to its simple and flexible interface along with the option to navigate via a mouse rather than a keyboard exclusive BIOS. MSI is no different and has offered not one but two versions of BIOS, EZ and Advanced versions, with the MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC so as to suit every customer's needs.
On boot up by default you'll be greeted with a more comprehensive and detailed EZ BIOS screen. This is a crammed up screen that has the details about all the components installed on the board along with options laid out neatly under clear tabs on the left side. If you want to change fan speeds, maybe boot devices, or use its automated overclocking function or A-XMP, you can do so quickly and easily.
This is a much preferred version for the beginners and though it comes with a Game Boost Knob on the top left its useless since the Gaming Pro Carbon doesn't support this feature. The "Memory Try It" feature is as always working well on this motherboard aswell and provide some easy overclocking features on the click for the RAM provided you don't expect too much here since we are talking about a Ryzen platform who's Infinity Fabric requires you to pay some attention and do some prior homework.
On pressing the F7 key you'll be teleported into the Advanced BIOS version or the traditional MSI UEFI BIOS version. This is a version that all the overclockers will love since the settings are broadly laid out with tab heading like Over Clocking Settings itself. A plethora of features are there out of which I'm showing you a selective few.
Bundled Software
This is the era when manufacturers provide customers with not just a motherboard and utility softwares that act more like blotwares if nothing else. Gigabyte App center is already what I've reviewed a lot of time & it has never failed to impress but MSI is no less rather a bit more refined in their approach.The heart of the software set is the MSI command set which gives you general features and information regarding the CPU, GPU, Fan Speed, IGP and the Game Boost knob...again!
Also one beautiful graphical window is there that provides you with temperature readings of each component & even tell you where they are located on the board.
The gaming app section is something that you'll be familiar to if you are a MSI graphic card owner. It give you all the information and tweaking options related to your GPU and you can select which vital stat you want to see on your screen. Also you can adjust mouse sensitivity and assign hot keys to your gaming mouse from here making it a one stop solution for gaming.
Another added feature this time is the support of wireless control over the MSI Command Center which can be achieved via an App for your cell phone that allows full control over the features of the motherboard including adjusting voltages and frequencies aswell!
Benchmarks and Overclocking
The AMD Ryzen 2700X comes bundled with a newly designed Wraith Prism RGB Air cooler designed by Cooler Master and is enough to keep you going for your daily use but since we are bench-marking here and my ambient temperature is not exactly very low in this Indian Summer weather I've decided to go the AIO way using the Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280 but still I'll drop in an image with the Wraith Prism for you to look and admire maybe if you are into RGB and stuff.
Before I talk any further first let's take a glance at the test bench configuration for this test which is well optimized for the processor and motherboard we are using here -
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
Motherboard: MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
RAM: G.Skill Trident Z RGB 16GB 3200Mhz
Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280
Graphics Card: MSI RX 580 Gaming X 8GB
Storage: Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB
Secondary Storage: ADATA XPG SX8000 256GB M.2 SSD
Power Supply: Cooler Master V1200 Platinum 1200W
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Our system was fully stable from the get go with no issues at all even in enabling the A-XMP profile on the memory to the rated 3200Mhz. Temperatures obviously are monitored via Ryzen Master utility and a few points worth mentioning here are that firstly the CPU hits 1.5v when under extensive load which even with an AIO cooler generates quite a lot of heat and hence the CPU clocks down to 4.08Ghz on all cores. Overclocking is easy on Ryzen 2700X on the MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC, you can simply leave the voltage to auto and play around with the multiplier or you can adjust both depending upon your choice and moreover cooling solution. I managed to hit a stable 4.2Ghz on all cores using 1.4v and the results were significantly higher however anything above that was too much for the CM MasterLiquid Pro 280 to handle but I'm sure one can easily hit 4.3-4.4 using a bigger AIO or best a custom cooling loop.
AIDA64 Cache & Memory Benchmark
AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a great tool to bench your CPU and RAM in
terms of their read-write-copy abilities. Our Ryzen 2700X along with the Trident Z RGB shows impressive results and we see that memory scaling sure has improved with the new Ryzen 2000 series.
AIDA64 GPGPU x64 CPU
The reason for including this benchmark was to simply observe the AES
and Hash Test which is a determent of how easily your CPU or GPU can
crunch complex calculations and higher score is always regarded better.
7-zip
7zip is a compression and decompression program that utilizes the processing power of the CPU alone. It is a synthetic benchmark that gives results very close to real life scores.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.
As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.
wPrime
wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions.
3DMark Fire Strike Extreme and Time Spy
Fire Strike Extreme and Time Spy by 3DMark is a test suit that plays a cinematic scene to determine the FPS, GPU temperature and CPU temperature scaling everything via a cumulative score. These are a great tool to benchmark your GPU since the render is GPU dependent especially Time Spy which is D12 based and is a direct reflection of modern day gaming performance that utilize DX12 more effectively.
PCMark 10
PCMark is an effective tool to bench and see the capacity of the system to handle day to day tasks like video conference, web browsing etc to professional tasks like rendering. Its a great tool to judge the overall potential of the system. With lower VRAM but higher clocked RAM we can see minor difference in the two systems here which can be neglected as in real life it wouldn't be noticeable.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Its old but still extremely effective to benchmark and one of my personal favorites. Using DX12 the settings are set to Very High preset at 1080p resolution with the graphics card set to stock with no additional tweaks be it manual or through the provided utility.
Assassin's Creed Unity
The latest installation of Assassin's Creed is set in Egypt and the toll that it takes on the graphical engine and CPU is heavy in fact its strong enough to brings down most of the modern rigs on their knees. The quality is set at Very High preset at 1080p.
CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2
Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB SATA SSD
ADATA XPG SX8000 256GB NVMe SSD
CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software that analyses different types of hard drive. Giving sequential benchmark write and read statistics in MB/s. A simple program that is very useful.
My Verdict
AMD has yet again hit the jackpot and given the main stream consumer something too aspire for and the existing Ryzen owners something compelling enough to make and upgrade, even though the older Ryzen is perfectly competent enough *wink*. The Ryzen 7 2700X in focus today is more tha enough for anything one would like to co with their PC and clearly beats the Ryzen 7 1800X in raw performance and offers improved gaming aswell as memory scaling which is an extremely welcome move all with the goodness of a bundles Wraith Prism RGB cooler!Talking about the motherboard manufacturers like MSI well they have done a splendid job when it came to designing & revamping the motherboards. The MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC is a breath of fresh air and its worth mentioning that MSI has been constantly changing and evolving their Pro Carbon lineup as per time and user feedback. The X470 Gaming Pro Carbon has an entirely new design which is infact a refined version of the X299 Gaming Pro Carbon which is a beautiful motherboard in its own rights.
The LEDs are yet again meticulously implemented by MSI on a pure black board and nifty features such as Memory Try it! in the BIOS are a welcome move. For a motherboard that costs around $180 its a steal deal for almost anyone out there who's on a budget.
"MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC is a Pro in terms of balance between much
needed features, distinctive yet elegant looks and to the point
pricing. Highly recommend to anyone who's willing to buy the new X470
platform without blowing a hole in their pocket!"
Pros -
- Elegant Looks
- Handles overclocking well
- Solid build quality
- Aptly Priced
- RGB implementation is subtle and effective
- Has WiFi and Bluetooth
Cons -
- No onboard Debug LED
- Bundled Software such as Mystic Light needs refinement
I give it a 8/10 earning our Gold Award!
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Mine won't boot, gives CPU light, any ideas?
ReplyDeleteHello,
DeleteIf the CPU light is lit without the system posting or booting into windows then check for the following -
1. Make sure the CPU 8-pin EPS power cable is connected properly into the port on the motherboard.
2. If the above doesn’t solve your issue then make sure the CPU is inserted properly with the triangle on the CPU matching with that on the motherboard, in short the Ryzen printed on the IHS of the CPU should be parallel to the IO shield on the motherboard.
3. If all the above fails then press the clear CMOS button for 10 seconds with the system turned off. Then try to boot again.
4. Still if the problem persists then make sure that the CPU is ok by using another motherboard of you can or by using another CPU on the motherboard if possible to make sure which one is the issue, the CPU or the motherboard.
Feel free to ask any further questions.