MSI X399 Pro Gaming Carbon AC Review
Up Close
The Pro Gaming Carbon packaging does everything we desire from our products. The main features – Threadripper support and MSI Mystic Light support – are clearly marked without the product shot become lost in a sea of technology icons that either wont mean much to the average person or are so obviously supplied with a high end product that mentioning them is needless.Â
By default the Carbon comes with Carbon inserts on the heatsinks, but as we’ll see on the next page the X399 Carbon supports the swappable panels we first saw on the X299 Carbon. Yes, AMD using the same naming style as Intel is extremely confusing, we’ll all have to just try and keep up.
If you saw our review of the X299 Pro Gaming Carbon then you’ll find the layout of the X399 Pro Gaming Carbon extremely familiar despite the switch from Intel to AMD chipset. Indeed this move has enabled MSI to insert a third M.2 connector between the PCI Express slots, whereas on the X299 there was just enough room for two.
All the slots are equipped with the Armor that has become a de facto standard feature on high end motherboards. It really ends an air of quality to proceedings and also accentuates the silver on the PCB. It’s incredible how much MSI have managed to squeeze into such limited real estate. The TR4 socket is enormous and once you’ve added eight DIMM slots and four PCI Express slots it is miraculous how they’ve managed to stick three M.2 slots on too. Fantastic work by their design team.
Elsewhere we have a few fan headers at strategic points helping to power the cooling so vital to high Threadripper performance, as well as the headers that allow the MSI Mystic Light to work its rainbow magic. Below the USB front panel header are the elements of the onboard overclocking that have become such a mainstay of MSI products since it first appeared many years ago.
About the only area we’re slightly disappointed is the somewhat small MOSFET cooler, particularly given the intense scrutiny that VRM temperatures are under in recent months. Hopefully it’s capable of keeping things under control.
