Overclocking

MSI's EFI is superb, so encountering issues here is pretty rare, and there's nothing bad to report - read our analysis here. However, overclocking wasn't exactly straightforward, as we had to tinker with loadline calibration to get things stable below 1.3V at 5GHz on our Core i9-9900K. Without it the board would crash, indicating probably vdroop, which is not uncommon when dealing with our Core i9; plenty of other boards also required loadline calibration. From here we managed to lower the vcore to a more respectable 1.24V.

Performance Analysis

As usual there aren't too many ills to report. The board was a tad slow in our content creation and rendering tests - slightly more than the margin of error would suggest, but not by amounts that would sway you from buying it.

Heading to our 3D and game tests, it was a similar story with results near the bottom of the graphs but again by low single-digit percentages at most.

It was on a par in the storage tests, though, with typical results in the SATA 6Gbps tests (peaking at 559MB/s) and 3,385MB/s using our Samsung 960 Evo M.2 SSD. Audio performance was excellent and near the top of the graphs courtesy of a well-tuned Realtek ALC1220 codec that put the MAG Z390 Tomahawk's ALC892 codec to shame. In fact, THD aside, the MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon AC outperformed the MEG Z390 Ace here too.

Conclusion

There's a lot to like with the MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon AC and very few niggles, so let's start with the latter. The Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro has more rear USB ports, so if five on the MSI board isn't enough, that board gets our vote instead, plus it has more fan headers and better control over them and is slightly snazzier in terms of lighting if that's your thing. However, for a similar price, the MSI board offers Wi-Fi and more USB future-proofing, so a lot will depend on whether they're dealbreakers for you. Other than this the two boards are evenly matched. 

Compared to the MAG Z390 Tomahawk, the extra £30 or so does net numerous benefits, but both boards were capable of overclocking our Core i9-9900K, so if you don't need Wi-Fi or USB 3.1 Type-C case headers or the best-performing audio out there then you can definitely save £30 without cutting too many features. Ultimately, the MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon AC is worth the cash and easily as good as the rest of it's similarly-priced competitors. However, it misses out on our top award due to a mediocre amount of USB ports, tricky M.2 heatsink, and lack of any stand-out features. It does, however, come recommended for the price it sits at.