MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi (4711377012881)

Product Information

For gaming audio, music, and movies, the board uses an ALC4080 audio processor capable of 32-bit/384kHz. It’s not quite as high quality as the ESS DACs we’ve seen on other boards, but it delivers high quality audio that’s free from interference. MSI has gone the extra mile to source audio specific capacitors and to build in special shielding to keep the audio signal clean, which is great to see. LAN and Intel Wi-Fi 6E Solution: Upgraded network solution for professional and multimedia use. Delivers a secure, stable and fast network connection AUDIO BOOST 5: Reward your ears with studio grade sound quality for the most immersive gaming experience And, as a fan of RGB lighting, I love the tasteful RGB MSI has implemented here. It’s just the dragon logo, nothing too overdone, but it provides a nice visual accent that looks great inside of a tempered glass case. On that front, MSI has also implemented a total of seven fan headers into the board. Five of these are for system fans and are intelligently positioned around the motherboard for clean wiring. There’s also a CPU and PUMP header for your air cooler’s fan of pump head if you’re water cooling.

For this review, I found that my 13900K sample already struggled to maintain its thermal limits so was unable to push it further without extending beyond the realms of comfort. But, should you opt for a custom water cooling solution or hit the silicon lottery, these options are plentiful and readily available within the system BIOS.The I/O panel has three buttons for easy user interfacing which can be changed in the BIOS. The Smart Button is user-changeable in functionality with the default being system reset, and other options include: Mystic Light toggle (unless LED_SW1 aka EZ LED Control is turned off), Safe Boot mode (by holding the smart button and powering on 0, causing the system to boot with default settings and lower PCIe mode values), and Turbo Fan which toggles all fans between full or default speeds. The Flash BIOS Button allows users to update their BIOS without a CPU even or RAM. The CPU_PWR1 and ATX_PWR1 connections will be required to enable the dedicated USB port, which you can use to insert a USB drive with a compatible BIOS renamed to MSI.ROM in the root directory. Users can then hit the Flash BIOS button, which causes the LED to start flashing on the button until the process is completed. The Clear CMOS button can be used to reset BIOS to default values by holding it down for 5-10 seconds. Next is the pair of blue USB 3.2 Gen 1 5Gbps Type-A ports with the top being used for the Flash BIOS button, and an HDMI port for video output of any iGPU depending on if the CPU has one. With everything removed we can take a good look at the motherboard in all of its glory! Hidden under all of the heatsinks are several ICs: a Nuvoton NCT6687D-M 8-bit microcontroller with internal storage for controlling Super I/O functions and SMART Fan, a Nuvoton NUC126NE4AE microcontroller based on an Arm Cortex-M0, the ASMedia ASM1061 SATA controller for the first two ports (unlike the other four SATA ports, these can’t be RAIDed), and the Macronix MXIC MX25U25673G storing a 256Mb CMOS. The Intel SRM8P Z790 chipset is large, yet only draws up to 6W TDP, and uses DMI 4.0 for the bus interface. There are also a number of quality of life features that I really appreciated with the board. It comes with a debug LED readout that is incredibly useful. As the system boots, it displays a series of codes that line up with what’s occurring at that moment, even if you don’t have video out to your PC. If there are any problems, the code will point you toward the source of the error. This is a feature that I refused to buy a motherboard without, so it’s great ot see it included here.

The main change is the inclusion of PCI-E 5.0 for graphics cards and SSDs. Most of the new Z790 boards have Gen 5 compatible slots which do a great job of opening upgrade paths for next-gen graphics card and SSD releases. We’ve also seen PCI-E 5.0 slots feature on a fair few on the cheaper boards which is a big selling point if you’re looking to upgrade in the future. SATA Cables If you’ve got any older storage drives that use the SATA data interface, you can install them with the included SATA cables. Compatible CPUs The top M.2 slot is Gen4 and the heatsink is easily removed with a clip on the edge. Below that is the Gen5 M.2 slot, followed by three more Gen4 M.2 slots under a U-shaped heatsink — these are provided by the chipset while the other two M.2 slots are provided by the CPU.With features and overview out of the way, let’s get into how the motherboard performed in benchmark testing. MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi - Performance

Premium Thermal Solution: Enlarged heatsink with heat-pipe, MOSFET thermal pads rated for 7W/mk, additional choke thermal pads and M.2 Shield Frozr are built for high performance system and non-stop gaming experience Intel Test System #2: MSI Z690 MPG Carbon WiFi, Corsair iCUE Elite LCD 360mm, Corsair DDR5-6000 Vengeance RGB Memory (32GB), Nvidia RTX 3090, Samsung 970 Pro NVMe 1TB, Corsair HX-1050 1050 Watt Power Supply, Windows 11 (fully updated).

User reviews

AUDIO BOOST 5: Manjakan kuping Anda dengan kualitas suara studio grade untuk pengalaman gaming yang paling imersif. Memory Support 7600+(OC)/7400 (OC)/7200(OC)/7000(OC)/6800(OC)/6600(OC)/6400(OC)/6200(OC)/6000(OC)/5800(OC)/5600(JEDEC)/5400(JEDEC)/5200(JEDEC)/5000(JEDEC) /4800(JEDEC) MHz

Memory Support 7600+(OC)/ 7400 (OC)/ 7200(OC)/ 7000(OC)/ 6800(OC)/ 6600(OC)/ 6400(OC)/ 6200(OC)/ 6000(OC)/ 5800(OC)/ 5600(JEDEC)/ 5400(JEDEC)/ 5200(JEDEC)/ 5000(JEDEC)/ 4800(JEDEC) MHz LAN dan Intel Wi-Fi 6E Solution: Solusi jaringan yang ditingkatkan untuk penggunaan profesional dan multimedia. Memberikan koneksi jaringan yang aman, stabil dan cepatInside, there are plentiful options to adjust the P-Core and E-Core multipliers, ratios, and multipliers. It also offers load line calibration to ensure your processor receives consistent, stable power. Intel’s Z790 chipset supports all of the brand new 13th-Gen range of CPUs along with the previous 12th generation series. This gives you plenty of options when it comes to upgrading. So if you’re purely looking to get some more rear IO or some more current features without a CPU upgrade, you can do this with a 12th-Gen CPU and a BIOS update. Intel Test System #1: MSI Z790 MPG Carbon WiFi, Corsair iCUE Elite LCD 360mm, Corsair DDR5-6000 Vengeance RGB Memory (32GB), Nvidia RTX 3090, Samsung 970 Pro NVMe 1TB, Corsair HX-1050 1050 Watt Power Supply, Windows 11 (fully updated). If you saw the first part of our review in progress for the Intel Core i9-13900K, then you’ve already had a sneak peak at gaming performance with this motherboard. Since I also had a Z690 Carbon WiFi on hand, as well as a 12900K, I decided to test it against the last generation board and to throw in the results using that board with a 12th gen CPU. Intel doesn’t expect there to be performance uplift in games and applications between Z690 and Z790, but I thought it would be interesting to show what the generational uplift is between the two models and CPUs.