[section_title title=”Conclusion”]

Conclusion

Okay, so there we have it! MSI’s latest addition to their Gaming Pro Carbon series that joins the X99 family has been tested, which means that it is now time  to go over the positive and negative points of the product. Is this the one to look at when you are spending approximately £290 ($420) on a motherboard? Perhaps … so let’s break it down into a few more detailed segments such as its performance, design and value areas.

It’s incredibly difficult to rate a motherboard on the various key aspects when there is only one other motherboard on the chart. However, we shall prevail and try to get to the bottom of this anyway. So, what we have is a board from MSI, the Gaming Pro Carbon, which managed to hold its own against the recently reviewed ASUS STRIX X99 Gaming. The one area in which it stands out by an absolute mile is the memory performance. I have been in touch with MSI and they told me that it is down to some very clever UEFI tweaking, something which is tweaked before you even enter the UEFI to tune the memory manually. Is it unfair given that they have such a huge lead? Absolutely not! Performance is performance, no matter how it is obtained, and especially when it doesn’t even require a hefty overclock to do so. These results were gathered with the memory running at XMP timings, and nothing more or less. As you may recall, I am simply in awe at the performance that MSI has been able to achieve from the memory on this particular motherboard. I will let you in on a sneak peek … I have an X99 Titanium inbound at some point, and I am extremely eager to look at that board to see if the performance is mirrored (or even better!) on that motherboard. For the rest of the benchmarks, however, it is largely a case of ‘you can win this one, and I will win the next’ sort of deal. Given that most of the benchmarks do benefit from sheer RAM speed and throughput, I am a little surprised that it didn’t win out in every benchmark. There’s more to it than just RAM, though, so that’s probably why.

The LEDs on the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon are somewhat powerful if that’s even the right terminology to use. They are bright and extremely bright at that. When you pair them with the software and make them dance, very literally, it becomes one awesome light show to behold. I did have a play around with the lights, but as they are largely the same as the Z170 Gaming Pro Carbon that I covered in the past, I didn’t make a video. If you would like to see a video on a future motherboard, please comment below and I will get one filmed on the Titanium (I think it has LEDs) when I get the chance. Aside from the LEDs, the design aspect of the Carbon does come with its thumbs up in my books. I love the carbon fibre look that the motherboard brings to the market. One thing which I do think is a little unfortunate is that when you are using three GPUs, which isn’t all that likely with the new Pascal GPUs due to the 2-way limitation, you will not have any space for peripheral cards such as a soundcard. It isn’t all doom and gloom, though, as the onboard sound offers great quality audio as it is.

Unfortunately for us in the UK, the price of this motherboard has shot up by around £30 ($50) since I first got my hands on it and the whole ‘Brexit’ thing happened, which makes it a little harder to cast my judgement on the Carbon. It was an absolute steal at £250 ($369 at the time) before ‘Brexit’ happened, but now that it is at £280 ($400), I need to mull this one over a little more. The price is fluctuating wildly, so as of the time of me writing this, it is as close to correct as it can be. Given that it has got amazing memory bandwidth which does give a good advantage in a number of benchmarks, and the great aesthetics of the motherboard bode well in its favour, I think that it is a good value for money motherboard. The Carbon strikes it right in a number of areas for me, as I just mentioned, and I think it would make a great backbone to any PC on the X99 platform, whether it be used for the new Broadwell-E processors or the older Haswell-E processors.

Judgement time! Even though the pricing cannot be helped, I have to go with what the motherboard is on the market for today. However, that does not stop me from awarding it with whatever I feel fit, does it? This is what I am going to go with. The MSI shines leaps and bounds ahead of its competition in the memory department, thanks to the MSI engineers who’ve worked their rear ends off; and the design is something which I feel will be appealing to a lot of people due to the simplistic black and chrome colour scheme. Value, as discussed, is currently out of our control, but I still feel safe to award it a 4/5 star for value. However, due to the outstanding performance in most benchmarks, especially when RAM is concerned, I am going to award it with my stamp of approval, and rate it as an Editor’s Choice motherboard! It will of course collect a Performance award and a design award as well. The design award is not purely down to aesthetics, it is also down to the way it is designed internally. It’s a great bit of kit, well done, MSI!

I’d like to conclude by thanking MSI for sending the MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon over for scrutiny.