MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X Review

Overclocking

No two boards have been the same with Z490, which goes to show just how all over the place things are with Intel's 10th Gen CPUs. For starters, the MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X didn't seem to boost anywhere near the 5.3GHz peak of our Core i9-10900K, but as we only test stock speed using EFI defaults plus XMP, that's not a surprise. The boost frequency rarely went above 5.1GHz and MSI also still hasn't released the 1.30 BIOS version we used to the product page either, despite this being weeks after launch. Overclocking didn't throw up many issues, though, with a solid 5.1GHz all-core overclock, but with a relatively high 1.32V vcore as well as loadline calibration needed to avoid stability issues in Cinebench. We watercool our standard test bench, so we're unable to comment on the performance of the waterblock, other than it was on-par with the Corsair HydroX block we use as standard.

Performance Analysis

The Cinebench score at stock speed was poor, at 510 -  a far cry from the 539 we saw with the MEG Z490 Ace but here, the default settings simply failed to get the CPU up to 5.3GHz. Once overclocked, this did rise to 524, which is mostly on-par with the overclocked scores of other boards, with a similar situation in the multi-threaded test. Blender was slower than average here compared to the other boards we've tested, which were a few seconds faster, but overclocking evened things out. Gaming performance was more on-par at stock and overclocked. Incidentally, MSI's boards seem to do much better when overclocked than the only Asus board we've tested so far.

Audio performance was middle of the road for a Realtek ALC1220-equipped motherboard, managing a dynamic range of 112.3dBA, although the Asus SupremeFX implementation on the ROG Strix Z490-E was a little better. Storage performance was as expected with our Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD, hitting 3,345MB/sec read and 1,870MB/sec write. The latest 1.30 BIOS did seem to have excessively high idle power consumption too, topping 110W at stock and overclocked, while the MSI MEG Z490 Ace was half these figures. Still room for improvement then, and things were no better under load, with a peak draw of 348W at stock speed - much higher than the rest of the field - and thanks to the need for loadline calibration to get things stable, the overclocked load draw was also much higher.

Conclusion

If you're a watercooling fan and slap copper on a variety of systems including mid-range ones, then the combination on offer here is interesting. Sadly, we can't really tell if you're getting a good deal seeing as the board isn't in stock anywhere in this guise, at least in the UK, and EK currently offers no Z490 standalone monoblocks on its website. We'd suggest waiting to see what the score is on that front. In terms of the motherboard, it's easy to think this is a £400 monster, when actually, it's not. It's very mid-range and really, given the choice of transplanting some old watercooling gear or a cheap waterblock on to the MEG Z490 Ace, or opting for the MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X, we'd definitely choose the former. It's a far sexier motherboard and even has fan-assisted VRM heatsinks, but it didn't really have any issues cooling them when the fans weren't spinning.

It's great to see a collaboration between EKWB and MSI and there will likely be plenty of people that would consider buying the MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X as a drop-in item, especially as the eye candy is in abundance. However, performance at stock speed and overclocked is a little lacking, overclocking headroom is limited, and we feel it's better value to get a more premium motherboard with decent air-based VRM cooling and more features.