The MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard Review
by Joe Shields on March 22, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- MicroATX
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- Gaming Pro Carbon
Gaming Performance
AoTS Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The original AoTS was released back in March of 2016 while the standalone expansion pack, Escalation, was released in November of 2016 adding more structures, maps, and units. We use this specific benchmark as it relies on both a good GPU as well as on the CPU in order to get the most frames per second. This balance is able to better display any system differences in gaming as opposed to a more GPU heavy title where the CPU and system don't matter quite as much. We use the default "Crazy" in-game settings using the DX11 rendering path in both 1080p and 4K UHD resolutions. The benchmark is run four times and the results averaged then plugged into the graph.
Our AOTSe testing continues to be a tight-knit dataset with almost 2 frames per second separating things in the more CPU heavy 1080p and less than 1 frame per second in 4K. The MicroATX Gaming Pro Carbon fit right in with 43.8 FPS at 1080p, while its 4K UHD results were the slowest of the bunch, but by less than a half FPS would have put it in the middle of the pack.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
Rise of the Tomb Raider results are also remarkably close together with the board delivering 93.3 FPS at 1080p and 39.9 FPS using 4K UHD resolution.
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eek2121 - Thursday, March 22, 2018 - link
You guys should pay closer attention to the quality of MSI motherboards. Especially how buggy their UEFI/BIOS is. For instance, 6 BIOS releases in a row on my x399 had bugs like overclocking values not saving unless you hit enter, broken fan profiles that didn't work, etc.halcyon - Friday, March 23, 2018 - link
Agreed. Have a Z370 MSi board and the UEFI/BIOS is a far cry from Asus or Asrock...Joe Shields - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
I can only report on what I tested and my experiences in testing them. I did not experience any of those issues in my testing time.hansmuff - Thursday, March 22, 2018 - link
Thank you for pointing out the terrible heatsink. In this price class, IMHO that makes it a no-go.gammaray - Thursday, March 22, 2018 - link
is there a point in buying that platform when the 8700k is king of gaming?mkaibear - Friday, March 23, 2018 - link
There are plenty of points in buying that platform. It makes for excellent workstations, the added parallelism over an 8700K makes it worthwhile if you're doing anything reasonably threaded but requiring decent single-core performance as well.Of course Threadripper has taken a chunk of the workstation space higher up, so there's less of a point than there was when it was launched, but not everyone only does gaming on their system.
(also if you are using a system for content creation or compiling at home, and you need a large number of cores but still want a system which will have decent performance in the latest games, there's a use case in there too)
But yes, if you want a pure gaming system then you'd go for one of the core iX-8x00s.
(I wouldn't go for an 8700k purely for gaming to be honest, I'd go for an i5-8400 probably and spend the extra money on a better graphics card)
PeachNCream - Friday, March 23, 2018 - link
MSI is marketing this motherboard for gaming which is explained in the product name X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC. It makes the question being asked a valid one.mkaibear - Friday, March 23, 2018 - link
I didn't question the validity of the question. I merely answered it!My Angle - Thursday, March 22, 2018 - link
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MDD1963 - Friday, March 23, 2018 - link
Would there be some advantage paying about $600-$800 extra for an X299/7900X- based gaming system over a Z370/8700K system? For gaming? Only thing even more silly is TR4/1950X....