AMD X870E Motherboard Mash-Up: Three Socket AM5 Mainboards Reviewed
Next up, we have the MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi. MPG, of course, stands for MSI Performance Gaming—you knew that, right?—and the Carbon line are historically MSI's top gaming-oriented hardware marque (leaving the range-topping "GODLIKE" brand for extreme hardcore enthusiasts and overclockers.) This board is a step up in both features and price over the Nova we just looked at.
Just looking at the specifications, you can see a number of upgrades over the Nova, including more and faster PCIe connectivity, dual LAN, much more USB connectivity, and support for 320-MHz Wi-Fi 7 are the standout features it gains over the previous board. You do lose the ECC support, though, and it loses an M.2 socket compared to the Nova.
It also dumps most of the RGB LED lighting, opting instead for tasteful accents like an illuminated dragon logo over the VRM hardware and I/O cluster, and an illuminated "MPG Carbon" logo over the first M.2 socket. MSI's PCIe latch solution is more elegant than ASRock's, too. Rather than a simple extension you pull on, it has a push-button that clicks to latch or unlatch the card in the slot.
MSI one-ups the Nova by making all four of the M.2 sockets accessible without any tools. In fact, it's almost comically easy to get at the storage slots of the X870E Carbon. Simply press against a metal button and the heatsinks pop free, revealing the slots. The drives themselves are secured by spring-loaded pegs, and at least one of those can be moved if you want to install a 110mm-long SSD.
That grey eight-pin power connector you can see in the picture above is one of the board's optional features. Plugging in a PCIe 8-pin power connector there will allow the board to supply up to 180W to the PCIe slots. We're not sure if this is really necessary, but perhaps for those doing extreme GPU OC, it could be useful.
MSI includes a block diagram in its manual as well, although it was arranged vertically, so we had to cut it up a little bit to fit it neatly on the page here. This one is easier to read than ASRock's, largely thanks to the descriptive icons representing each connected device. It's not clear what the difference between the ALC4080 and ALC4082 is, but MSI's board uses the 4080, unlike the other two.
The I/O panel of the X870E Carbon is absolutely stuffed to the gills with functionality. You get no less than four USB Type-C ports, two of which are the standard USB4 while the other two are 10G-capable. Then, there are nine Type-A ports, all of which are 10G-capable. No USB 2.0 here! An HDMI 2.1 port, dual Ethernet jacks, the standard audio connectors, and three easy-access buttons including a configurable Smart Button round out the back panel ports.
One note we have to make about the X870E Carbon's rear panel, though, is that it does not actually use RP-SMA connectors for its Wi-Fi antenna. Instead, the connectors appear to be MCX coaxial plugs, which, unlike the usual RP-SMA connectors, do not require screwing and unscrewing threaded plugs. Instead, they simply snap into the antenna ports on the back of the motherboard. This is very convenient for most users, but if you're trying to use an existing antenna run, it's probably not going to work.
Of the three boards we're looking at today, the X870E Carbon easily has the most elaborate UEFI setup utility. That's not completely a good thing, though, at least in our eyes. The new MSI Click BIOS X is both somewhat complicated and also laggy. Many functions are hidden behind unlabeled icons, like the highlighted Hardware Monitor in the picture above; the name is only visible because we've moused over it. Fan controls are tucked away in that menu despite that it doesn't give you any indication that it would include fan controls.
Another issue with the Click BIOS X is that when you select a category from the left, that menu is replaced by an MSI MPG logo while you're working within the category. This seems like needless obfuscation. The X870E Carbon's UEFI setup utility is certainly full-featured, but we find the organization to be overly complicated and the layout to be confusing when compared with the less-elaborate-yet-more-intuitive UEFI setup interface on the Nova. Folks who prefer using the mouse for navigation will probably like it, though.
