MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon Short Review
Hello and welcome to the short review of MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon. Carbon fiber instantly sends visions of speed, performance, and exotic technology to many. Wrapped in carbon fiber look trim, B350 Gaming Pro Carbon aims to instill many of those same visions. Built on MSI’s Military Class 5 foundation, the B350 Gaming Pro Carbon supports AMD’s newest Ryzen processors and DDR4 memory up to 3200Mhz via four memory slots. There’s Turbo M.2 connectivity with transfer speeds up to 32 Gb/s.
Ryzen was plagued with BIOS and Software stability at launch. MSI, however, has revised their UEFI based Click BIOS to version 5, which has exclusive MSI Boost Overclocking features. There are also options which allows quite a bit of control over the BIOS, overclocking, LAN, and other various features from inside the Windows environment as well.
MSI’s take on the B350 platform with the Gaming Pro Carbon
- Supports AMD RYZEN Series processors and 7th Gen A-series / Athlon Processors for socket AM4
- Supports DDR4-3200+(OC) Memory
- DDR4 Boost: Give your DDR4 memory a performance boost
- VR Ready and VR Boost: Best virtual reality game experience without latency, reduces motion sickness
- Mystic Light and Mystic Light Sync: Control all LEDs in system with one click by GAMING APP or mobile devices
- Lightning Fast Game experience: Turbo M.2, M.2 Shield, Lightning USB 3.1 Gen2
- Audio Boost 4 with Nahimic 2: Reward your ears with studio grade sound quality for the most immersive gaming experience
- GAMING LAN with LAN Protect, powered by Intel: The best online gaming experience with lowest latency and bandwidth management
- Military Class 4, Guard-Pro: Latest evolution in high quality components for best protection and efficiency
- MULTI-GPU: With Steel Armor PCI-E slots. Supports AMD Crossfire
- In-Game Weapons: Game Boost, GAMING Hotkey, X-Boost, Xsplit Gamecaster
- EZ Debug LED: Easiest way to troubleshoot
- Click BIOS 5: Award-winning BIOS with high resolution scalable font, favorites and search function
- GAMING CERTIFIED: 24-hour on- and offline game and motherboard testing by eSports players
- WHQL certified for Windows 10
The MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon a beauty to behold and instantly instill a strong sense of speed. The carbon fiber look trim combined with MSI’s excellent Mystic RGB Lighting is sure to win many fans and I’m one of them. The beauty and speed extends deep into the heart of the B350 Gaming Pro Carbon as well.
Packaging and Unboxing
The MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon box is perhaps the most colourful box we’ve seen a motherboard come in. A literal rainbow of colour dominates the background with a carbon fiber dressed hypercar featured predominately in the foreground. The rear of the box features several detailed pictures showcasing many of the motherboard’s features. Some of the motherboard’s basic specifications are included as well. It is quite detailed and easy to read.
Inside the box, we find the regular accessories we have come to expect such as the User Guide and a CPU cooler mounting guide, utility disk and registration card, Quick Installation Guide and cable labels, An RGB extension cables and the rear I/O shield.
CloseUp
The B350 Gaming Pro Carbon is part of MSI’s Performance Gaming series motherboards. The Performance Gaming Series features more subtle cosmetics than MSI’s Enthusiast Gaming and Arsenal Gaming series’.Carbon fiber look trim adjourns the B350 Gaming Pro Carbon in plenty. It borders on being subtle and aggressive at the same time.
There are two USB 2.0 ports and four USB Type-A 3.1 Gen1 ports. MSI has are included two “Lightening” USB 3.1 Gen2 ports, consisting of a Type-A and Type-C design. USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports offer twice the bandwidth of USB Type-A 3.1 Gen 1 ports.
A PS/2 keyboard/mouse port allows for legacy input device connectivity. There are also HDMI and DVI video connections.
The lower rear of the motherboard contains most of the front panel audio connections. There is also a system fan connector and a RGB LED connector. Audio on the B350 Gaming Pro Carbon is provided by MSI’s Audio Boost 4 which is powered by Realtek’s latest ALC1220 chipset.
The lower front of the motherboard contains most of the rest of front panel connections.The lower M.2 socket features a shield. The shield acts as a heatspreader to wick away heat from the M.2 drive. This allows the drive to last longer and to maintain peak speeds longer due to lessened heat throttling.
The lower front of the motherboard contains 4 SATA 6.0 connectors, as well as a single USB 3.0 front panel connector.
The upper front of the motherboard has a second USB 3.0 front panel connector, the 24 pin power connector, and two fan connectors.
The 8-pin CPU power connector is almost unnoticeable being tucked in the upper left hand corner.
Things are a bit snug around the CPU socket, but still a bit more open than might be expected in part to the VRM heatsink design.
Performance Testing
Before we jump into performance numbers. Heres a look at the test system we used:
- Ryzen R7 1700X
- MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon
- 16GB DDR4 @2666 MHz
- Kingston SSDNow V300 240GB
- AMD RX570 4GB DDR5 GPU
- CoolerMaster V1000 PSU
We ran the CPU through the short version of our benchmark gauntlets for now. We will be adding more tests into it so don’t forget to check back in a while.
Aida 64 CPU
CineBench R15
GeekBench 4
WPrime
Conclusion
Throughout the testing, the B350 Gaming Pro Carbon showed mostly well above average scores. Storage performance was quite good as well. The overclocking ability of the B350 Gaming Pro Carbon is good(At least during our short time with it the board was performed solidly). The general layout is very good, with every connector, jack, and switch in their proper places. I was rather surprised how much room there was around the CPU socket. The angles of the VRM heatsinks surrounding the CPU socket made cooler installation much easier than most of the enthusiast boards at this price. Overall a pretty nice board with usable features all around. Add to that MSI’s decent after sales policy we ahve a nice product in our hands!
