Gaming Pro Carbon AC has been MSI's top dog for mid-range at various AMD and Intel sockets over the past few years. You can usually expect a slightly cheaper premium feature, but at a much lower price than the all-singing, all-dancing model that usually sells for over £ 200.
If you want a premium touch, like RGB lighting, M.2 heatsinks, decent power circuits, and VRM cooling and you're in the market or already have one AMD 2 AMDzen AMDzen CPU then you'll want to keep reading. MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC is the cheapest X470 board we reviewed so far, though we'll see a cheaper model next week.
MSI has made some deductions to get the price here, as expected, and it's easy to make comparisons with the X470 Gaming M7 AC. There is a total of 16 power phases on the M7, but it drops to 12 with the X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC, although you still get eight pins 12V EPS connector for CPU. No need to use both, of course, and the second will only be useful for extreme overclockers, but it's still a nice touch.
VRM cooling makes sense also with two large heatsinks, and while there is no heat piping connecting the two, MSI seems to do good things when it comes to reigning in power consumption, at least with the M7 boards we saw recently, so we ' expect more of the same here. RGB lighting is pretty controllable, but you get LEDs under PCH, I / O shroud, and below the right side of the PCB, and these can also be controlled individually. In the case of headers, you get a pair of RGB four-pin standard headers plus a single three-pin header for the addressable LED strip. This is a pretty handsome motherboard, and remains color neutral, so it will not interfere with the color scheme of your case if you have it.
The X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC makes rare steps including eight 6Gbps SATA ports instead of the usual six, and this beats the most £ 200 + X470 board we've ever seen. It's powered by an X470 chipset, although there's some mixing and pounding going in terms of bandwidth. For example, one SATA port will not be available if you are using a SATA M.2 SSD in the second M.2 slot. Port M.2 also has certain bandwidth settings that you need to watch carefully if you are going to use it. The main slot at the top has its own x4 lane feed from the CPU so it offers full PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth, but is not compatible with SATA SSDs. The fact of having a heatsink here makes sense; this is where you want to put your grilled NVIE SSD.
The second slot, though, is limited to PCIe 2.0 x4 bandwidth, and this will inhibit modern NVMe SSDs like the Samsung 900-series. Fortunately, this port also supports SATA M2 SSD, so when you do not want to play with twin Samsung 960 Evos in this slot, there is a possibility of using the top slot for PCIe NVMe SSD for your OS and games plus lower slot for SATA SSD bigger and cheaper, or just reign in a little budget and just use the latter instead of a 2.5 "SSD and get a few cable shots, which is always a good thing, given that M.2 and 2.5" SATA SSDs are similar in price.
MSI fan control capabilities via EFI and software are not extensive enough like Gigabyte, do not have the ability to turn off the fan, for example, but they still offer a decent amount of control. You get six four-pin fan headers with one dedicated to the water cooling pump as well, which is capable of removing 2A / 24W and obviously changing that power or giving a PWM signal to control pump speed. You can use it for AIO cooling pumps, but with 24W in taps, there is room to control DIY pump kits from people like Laing as well.
As always, the AC version of the board offers 802.11ac Wi-Fi onboard, and you get a regular screw antenna in the box as well. The rear panel also offers HDMI and DisplayPort outputs if you want to include one AMD APU (you obviously need a discrete GPU for another), and there are seven practical Type-A USB ports. Another cut compared to M7 is the USB 3.1 Type-C header for a compatible case, but you get Type-A and Type-C USB 3.1 ports on the rear I / O panel. There is also a shortage of overclocking tools and onboard testing, but fortunately you get a clear CMOS button on the back, though we never have a reason to use it. Fortunately, MSI has not reduced the network or audio; You get the usual Realtek ALC 1220 audio codec plus an Intel I211AT Gigabit LAN controller.
Specifications
- Chipset AMD X470
- Form factor ATX
- CPU support AMD Socket AM4
- Memory support Dual-channel, four slots, max 64GB
- Sound Eight-channel Realtek ALC 1220
- Networking 1 x Intel Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5
- Ports 1 x M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 32Gbps (PCIe only, up to 22110), 1 x M.2 PCIe 2.0 x4 (PCIe/SATA 6Gbps up to 2280), 6 x SATA 6Gbps, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 8 x USB 3.0 (4 via headers), 6 x USB 2.0 (4 via headers), 1 x LAN, audio out, line in, mic, Optical S/PDIF out
- Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244
- Extras RGB LED extension cable, Wi-Fi aerials