MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon review: Sleek looks and strong performance

Stealthy looks and a ton of features

There’s not a lot to be said about motherboard aesthetics these days. Is it black? You bet it is. Does it have a dazzling array of onboard lighting options? Probably. But every now and then, manufacturers do something that really help a board stand out in the looks department, and this is one area that MSI has been doing really well in.

Since the first Intel Z170 Titanium edition board that we saw last year, MSI has rolled out more Titanium boards with striking titanium-colored PCB and heatsinks and rich feature sets geared toward extreme overclockers. It also introduced new boards with carbon fiber finishes, like the X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon and Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon. It’s not quite titanium, but if we’re going to be honest here, carbon fiber does look very, very cool.

With that said, the MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon appears aimed at filling the gap between the extravagant X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon and the more mainstream Z170 board. It’s an Intel X99 board, which means it’s made of enthusiast-grade stuff, but it isn’t quite as over the top as the X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon and won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

In fact, at S$599, it’s fairly reasonably priced, and you get a whole lot of features that should be enough to keep most users happy.

We’ve already taken a closer look at what the board has to offer in our preview article here, so we’ll look only at the software the board has to offer, before skipping ahead to the performance results in the next section.

MSI Gaming App and Command Center

While the ASUS ROG Strix X99 Gaming has the Aura lighting control software, MSI has its Gaming App. When used in tandem with a compatible MSI graphics card (we tested this with the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G), you can control all the LEDs on both motherboard and graphics card in tandem, or tweak the colors and effects in the individual lighting zones.

There’s actually four independent zones on the board itself, so there’s quite a wide range of possibilities at your disposal. In addition, you get to choose from several different lighting styles, or simply set the lights to pulse in time to your music.

The Gaming App itself also supports an on-screen display (OSD) for system information like CPU usage, frequency, and temperature. The OSD can be displayed in games as well, for easier monitoring of overclock stability for instance, and the supported games include even the latest titles like Overwatch and Tom Clancy’s The Division.

Then there’s the MSI Command Center, which is really a sort of value-added OS-based overclocking utility. You can use it to monitor clock speed of each core (although for our 10-core Intel Core i7-6950X we seemed only to be able to view 8 cores), and tweak the CPU ratio or base clock from the OS itself. With that said, enthusiasts will probably prefer to do their adjustments within the BIOS itself, but the Command Center – the UI is intuitive enough – provides an alternative should they want a different interface.

Test Setup

Here's the system configuration we used to test the ROG Strix X99 Gaming:

• Intel Core i7-6950X (3.0GHz, 25MB cache)
• 2 x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2133 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-36)
• MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G (GeForce Driver Version 368.81)
• Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SATA 6Gbps solid state drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

As we noted in our review of the ASUS ROG Strix X99 Gaming, we don’t have many Intel X99 motherboards to compare the board with, especially since we've chosen to use the new 10-core CPU, so we’ll use the latter board as a point of comparison for the MSI board.

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Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were used to test the motherboards:

• BAPCo SYSmark 2014 (ver 1.5.1.47)
• SPECviewperf 12.0.2
• Cinebench R15
• Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

SYSmark 2014

SYSmark is a general productivity benchmark suite that measures the response times of tasks on a PC using real-world applications like Microsoft Office 2013 and Adobe Photoshop and simulated user input. Task response times are used to generate a performance rating that reflects actual user experience, so the faster a PC responds to application workloads, the higher its score will be. The method of measuring response times can take many forms, such as the time it takes for an application to show a pop-up completion message, or how long it takes a progress dialog to disappear and for a user to regain application control.

All in all, we weren’t expecting any major differences in performance, given that we were running identical setups on both motherboards. This was the case in SYSmark, which evinced negligible differences between the two boards. The MSI board took the lead in the overall score, but for all practical intents and purposes, the boards performed the same here.

Maxon Cinebench R15

Cinebench is a benchmark tool used to compare CPU performance across different systems, so we’ll be using it to evaluate how well the Intel Core i7-6950X plays with the two motherboards. The test scenario uses all of the system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene, making use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

Once again, performance was remarkably close, but the lead went to the ASUS board this time.

SPECviewperf 12.0.2

SPECviewperf is used to measure the 3D graphics performance of systems in professional applications. Each individual workload, called a viewset, represents graphics and content from an actual real-world application. Compared to SPECviewperf 11.0, this latest version of SPECviewperf includes updated traces from the latest application versions and is designed to provide a more accurate indication of GPU performance in the actual applications.

SPECviewperf actually runs a total of eight different viewsets, but we’ve picked just three to display here. The maya-04 viewset is derived from Autodesk’s Maya 2013 application. Lightwave-01 from PTC is no longer tested – instead, it’s been replaced by creo-01, also from PTC. We also included the new energy-01 viewset, which puts the board through some professional volume rendering applications.

The results were once again virtually indistinguishable here. For certain benchmarks, the differences even amounted to less than a single point. Suffice to say, the boards are neck-and-neck with each other in terms of performance, and no practical differences can be drawn from these results.

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark is a synthetic gaming benchmark that tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stresses your hardware in turn to assess its performance. And because of the physics test that keeps the GPU load low while running gameplay physics simulations on the CPU, all three 3DMark Fire Strike tests scores also include an element of CPU performance.

Both boards traded blows here, with the ASUS motherboard coming ahead in Fire Strike, and the MSI taking the lead in Fire Strike Extreme and Ultra. Having said that, the differences are again too little to make a difference in real-world performance.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Finally, we ran Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to get an idea of real-world gaming performance. As per the graph, you can see that the performance gap was once again insignificant. In fact, they were remarkably consistent with each other, as both the ASUS and MSI board came within a single frame of each other at all the tested resolutions.

Temperature

We measured the temperatures of the VRM and PCH heatsinks after running 25 loops of the new Fire Strike stress test.

As it turns out, both boards feature relatively similar heatsink designs (there are no additional heatpipes linking the VRM and PCH heatsinks for instance), and they turned out relatively similar temperatures.

Power Consumption

To test power, we ran the energy-01 viewset in SPECviewperf 12.0.2 and recorded the peak power consumption.

The MSI motherboard had a higher idle and peak power consumption than the ASUS motherboard. It’s still not a significant amount, but it does set the MSI board back a little against its counterpart from ASUS.

Overclocking

In order to assess the respective overclocking performance of the boards, we first tweaked the CPU multiplier ratio and raised the voltage accordingly. After ascertaining that the achieved clock speed was stable, we then attempted to increase the BCLK value to get smaller overclock increments. The table below shows the clock speeds we achieved, along with the CPU vCore, multiplier, and RAM frequencies. We've also included the respective BIOS versions of the boards for those who are keen to know such details.

As it turns out, we were unable to go past 4.3GHz by tweaking the CPU multiplier, and any attempts at adjusting the BCLK to achieve more minute clock speed increases also failed. Both boards actually utilize an 8-phase power design, and while we’ve said before that it’s the quality of the implementation and not the number of phases that really matters, this only goes to show how similar the two really are. What's more, they even cost the same at S$599, so they're truly direct competitors in every sense of the word. With that said, our result still amounted to a good increase over the default multiplier value of 30, and we managed to achieve a 23 percent performance improvement on the MSI board after overclocking, the same as on the ROG Strix X99 Gaming.

In possession of both style and substance

It’s all too easy for hardware products to catch the eye with sleek designs and fancy trappings, only to fall short at the end because they just don’t have the goods back them up. Fortunately, the MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon manages to avoid falling into this pit. In fact, it sails over it entirely, and this is one board that both looks good and performs well.

For S$599, you get a solidly built board that comes with plenty of features to make it overall more useable and reliable. This means things like a dedicated 4-pin RGB header for hooking up an external LED strip to to further trick out your rig, EZ debug LEDs that indicate immediately which component is causing the trouble, and the Game Boost knob to manually overclock your CPU without having to enter the BIOS (you’ll still need to reboot the system for the changes to take effect as it actually alters the CPU BCLK). There's even a dual BIOS switch, which the similarly priced ASUS ROG Strix X99 Gaming lacks.

On top of that, you get PCIe and DIMM slots that have been reinforced by metal, which reduces the chance of damage from clumsy installations or the weight of heavy graphics cards.

The wide range of LED customization options is just the icing on top of the cake. With LEDs built into the PCH and VRM heatsinks, I/O cover, and audio shielding, you can make the board however brilliant (or subtle, if you’re shooting for a tasteful underglow) you want.

All in all, MSI has created quite a winning combination, with a tastefully designed board and the right feature set – and the overclocking performance – to appeal to enthusiasts. If you’re looking for a mid-range Intel X99 board, the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon should be on your list of contenders. 

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