MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon Review

Performance Analysis

The Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon put in a rock-solid performance in all of our tests where at worst it was above average, but usually within a fraction of matching the top results we've seen, both at stock speed and when overclocked. It's big brother, the MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium Edition, managed to pip it in many of our tests, but it came back once overclocked to better it in Cinebench and mostly match it in other tests too. In short, in raw performance terms, it was well within the limits of our usual expectations for Z170 boards - they don't differ that much here.


Audio performance was noticeably better than other budget-conscious MS boards such as the MSI Z170A Gaming M5 and MSI Z170A SLI Plus, with barely more than the margin of error for our RightMark Audio Analyser tests separating it from the best results. It was also a tad better than the Asus Xonar DGX 5.1 sound card, so unless you're opting for something much more potent to fill one of the Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon's numerous 1x PCI-E slots, there's not much point considering a separate sound card.

Once again, there was nothing particularly bad or good to say about the power consumption or storage results either. The additional vcore required to hit 4.8GHz didn't result in anything like the highest power consumption on test, while it was just a few megabytes a second slower than the best results we've seen in out SATA 6GB/sec and M.2 storage tests.

Conclusion

The best part of the Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon is the price. It offers a bunch of extra features over your typical sub £100 motherboard, such as RGB lighting albeit somewhat limitedly, full USB 3.1 support, decent audio performance and solid overclocking. MSI has hit the nail on the head here so if you can't quite stretch to the likes of Asus' Maximus VIII Hero and don't fancy downsizing to Gigabyte's excellent micro-ATX Z170MX-Gaming 5 then it's a fantastic choice.

We'd also argue that it's a much better option than the slightly cheaper MSI Z170A SLI Plus and more expensive MSI Z170A Gaming M5 too - both still lack most of the usual overclocking and testing tools while the SLI Plus wasn't quite as good an overclocker and the Gaming M5 costs £20 more. Coupled with a decent set of software and excellent EFI, aside from a couple of layout niggles, this is a highly recommended motherboard for building a budget-conscious Skylake system.