MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard Review

[Guest]

MSI looks to make premium X99 boards more affordable.

MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard Review : Read more

 

[JamesSneed]

Must admit its an odd time to be reviewing a X99 board with the X299 boards imminent.

 

[AgentLozen]

Must admit its an odd time to be reviewing a X99 board with the X299 boards iminent.

The same thought occured to me also. I feel like Broadwell-E CPUs just don't make any sense right now with Ryzen on the market. I was go as far as to say that if you were building a high end desktop, buying Broadwell-E is a bad investment.

 

[JamesSneed]

Must admit its an odd time to be reviewing a X99 board with the X299 boards iminent.

The same thought occured to me also. I feel like Broadwell-E CPUs just don't make any sense right now with Ryzen on the market. I was go as far as to say that if you were building a high end desktop, buying Broadwell-E is a bad investment.

Not so much Ryzen, its that the Skylake-x embargo lifts this coming Monday. Then the new HEDT X299 platform will be hitting shelves in two weeks. Its mostly pointless to be reviewing something that is obsolete in three days in my opinion. I would venture to guess the Broadwell-E sales between now and two weeks are pretty much dead knowing you have a cheaper and faster Skylake-X immanent.

 

[dstarr3]

It's a good thing I built my new computer just a couple years ago. I can wait until this RGB fad is mercifully over before having to build a new one.

 

[JamesSneed]

It's a good thing I built my new computer just a couple years ago. I can wait until this RGB fad is mercifully over before having to build a new one.

Yeah well I need a new PC so I'm in the other camp. At least it can be turned off. I just wish they did the LED thing with useful intent. Say back lighting your front panel ports and back ports so you can see where plug stuff even its its pretty dark for those of us who have our cases under desks. The ASUS Zenith board put a color coded LED in each 3.5mm audio ports on the back so you can see where to plug stuff in low light, this kind of thing would be nice.

 

[artk2219]

Honestly I kind of feel bad for the reviewer, he probably worked on this review for some time, only for us to all basically scratch our heads and ask why? With Ryzen out, and Core I9 and Threadripper releasing in a very short amount of time X99 is basically a dead platform, one that no one should be moving to unless your replacing a broken board, and dont feel like making a bigger change. But even then, this board alone is the price of a Ryzen 1600 and motherboard, and you could probably reuse the DDR 4 from the previous build (if it was broadwell or haswell based).

 

[RedJaron]

Not all reviews are posted the instant they're completed. If there's some kind of exclusive, such as a new GPU launch or tradeshow news, those will usually bump basic product reviews down. With the 1080 Ti reviews, Computex, and E3 recently, amid other things, this got delayed.

 

[JamesSneed]

Not all reviews are posted the instant they're completed. If there's some kind of exclusive, such as a new GPU launch or tradeshow news, those will usually bump basic product reviews down. With the 1080 Ti reviews, Computex, and E3 recently, amid other things, this got delayed.

The board came out 6 months ago.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon: The board being reviewed here.
ASRock X99 Taichi: Can't find a review on this site for it at all. Where is its review on this site?
Gigabyte GA-X99P-SLI: Can't find a review on this site for it at all. Where is its review on this site?

 

[the nerd 389]

$280 and no PWM support on the pump header or case headers?

MSI should be ashamed of themselves. I can, begrudgingly, forgive them for not putting PWM on the case fan headers, but the pump header? Really? There's no excuse for that at any price. That goes beyond terrible engineering, and is possibly even worthy of a class-action lawsuit.

After all, if you put a build together with the assumption that the pump header is suitable for pumps, you could destroy the pump and it would be entirely the fault of the motherboard. Depending on the build, the loss of a pump could cause a cascade failure in the CPU and corruption of the OS.

 

[grozzie]

Should have called the board the 'Spinal Tap' edition! A knob that goes to '11' wow! well impressive. Obviously spent all their RD budget on that.

 

[castl3bravo]

Lack of PWM? Dead to me.

 

[rediornot]

if you have been watching the news, the new x299 and the i9 are a bad upgrade all the way around, a lot of features are not there and prior edition hardware for your build will not all be compatable.
so, wait and see. now is a good time to use upgraded because folks are not going to pay an arm and a leg for the hype boards and cpus that intel is trying to push just because amd came out with something good.

 

[gulvastr]

Must admit its an odd time to be reviewing a X99 board with the X299 boards iminent.

The same thought occured to me also. I feel like Broadwell-E CPUs just don't make any sense right now with Ryzen on the market. I was go as far as to say that if you were building a high end desktop, buying Broadwell-E is a bad investment.

Not really. I just bought a 6850k, AsRock Extreme4 board and 32gb of 3200 Corsair ram for under $900.

This will will give me:
6 cores (2 more than i have now with a 4790k)
40 PCI lanes (24 more than my 4790k and now I can run my 1080 sli at x16/x16)
DDR4 ram instead on DDR3
and a soldered IHS

Solid upgrade for less than a 7900k alone and better specs that a Ryzen (its a gaming rig)

 

[JamesSneed]

Must admit its an odd time to be reviewing a X99 board with the X299 boards iminent.

The same thought occured to me also. I feel like Broadwell-E CPUs just don't make any sense right now with Ryzen on the market. I was go as far as to say that if you were building a high end desktop, buying Broadwell-E is a bad investment.

Not really. I just bought a 6850k, AsRock Extreme4 board and 32gb of 3200 Corsair ram for under $900.

This will will give me:
6 cores (2 more than i have now with a 4790k)
40 PCI lanes (24 more than my 4790k and now I can run my 1080 sli at x16/x16)
DDR4 ram instead on DDR3
and a soldered IHS

Solid upgrade for less than a 7900k alone and better specs that a Ryzen (its a gaming rig)

Trust me you are a very rare person but you do make some good points.

The 1080 sli point is valid yeah you can run it 16/16 but it wont change performance since a 1080 doesn't saturate even X8 PCIE 3.0.

The soldered IHS is a curious point that will have to see Monday how reviews go on the TIM with Skylake-x. I suspect without overclocking they will be similar but OC'ed the TIM will fall short however it should't be as bad as KabyLake as Intel improved the layers and has the lid closer so there is less air gap / TIM to put in there.

 

[JamesSneed]

if you have been watching the news, the new x299 and the i9 are a bad upgrade all the way around, a lot of features are not there and prior edition hardware for your build will not all be compatable.
so, wait and see. now is a good time to use upgraded because folks are not going to pay an arm and a leg for the hype boards and cpus that intel is trying to push just because amd came out with something good.

I'm not sure I totally agree, in a month this is the best time in a decade to upgrade with Ryzen, Intel x299, and AMD threadripper, and AMD's Vega all in the market by right around then. You get to pick what is important to your workload and actually have options.

The 7820x should be a hell of a gaming CPU / minor multi threaded applications due to its higher clocks you get high frequency and multithreading but for a price. As long as you have no more than 1 m.2 drive and 2 GPU's the PCIE lanes wont get saturated, which is most high end gamers. Do I think Intel is being a douche by limiting the lanes yup I do, does it matter to most people, nope.

Plus you have the cheaper 10 core threadripper with 64 PCIE lanes for the mining folks which I bet those will fly off shelves as PCIE lanes and memory bandwidth are king not so much CPU frequency.

 

[dstarr3]

if you have been watching the news, the new x299 and the i9 are a bad upgrade all the way around, a lot of features are not there and prior edition hardware for your build will not all be compatable.
so, wait and see. now is a good time to use upgraded because folks are not going to pay an arm and a leg for the hype boards and cpus that intel is trying to push just because amd came out with something good.

I'm not sure I totally agree, in a month this is the best time in a decade to upgrade with Ryzen, Intel x299, and AMD threadripper, and AMD's Vega all in the market by right around then. You get to pick what is important to your workload and actually have options.

The 7820x should be a hell of a gaming CPU / minor multi threaded applications due to its higher clocks you get high frequency and multithreading but for a price. As long as you have no more than 1 m.2 drive and 2 GPU's the PCIE lanes wont get saturated, which is most high end gamers. Do I think Intel is being a douche by limiting the lanes yup I do, does it matter to most people, nope.

Plus you have the cheaper 10 core threadripper with 64 PCIE lanes for the mining folks which I bet those will fly off shelves as PCIE lanes and memory bandwidth are king not so much CPU frequency.

Yeah, there's a few sites that already got their hands on an i9 7900x. It's still $1,000, but it's CRUSHING Intel's last-gen CPUs that cost twice as much. So, it's a very exciting time.