MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard Review
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How We Test
The Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC goes up against its most closely priced rivals in today’s comparison.
| Sound | Integrated HD Audio |
| Network | Integrated Gigabit Networking |
| Graphics Driver | GeForce 382.53 |
Back during the X299 launch, we upgraded our test bed to handle the tremendous heat produced by the Core i9-7900X. Our award-winning Fractal Design S24 liquid cooler system sample serves the same purpose for the newer, lower heat Core i7-8700K. Cooler Master’s HAF-XB provides an optimal layout to blow the Celsius S24’s fans sufficiently over each motherboard’s voltage regulator.
Comparison Products
All of the boards in today’s test have a broad enough range of overclock setting to reach similar heights, but some have finer increments than others. EVGA’s 1mV setting steps are deceiving in that we couldn’t tell where we’d end up without excessive testing (the 15mV jump in DRAM, for example, was merely discovered after testing many 1mV increments).
Benchmark Settings
| Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings | |
| PCMark 8 | Version 2.7.613Home, Creative, Work, Storage, Applications (Adobe & Microsoft) |
| 3DMark 13 | Version 4.47.597.0Skydiver, Firestrike, Firestrike Extreme Default Presets |
| SiSoftware Sandra | Version 2016.03.22.21CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cryptography, Memory Bandwidth |
| DiskSPD | 4k Random Read, 4k Random Write128k Sequential Read, 128k Sequential Write |
| Cinebench R15 | Build RC83328DEMOOpenGL Benchmark |
| CompuBench | Version 1.5.8Face Detection, Optical Flow, Ocean Surface, Ray Tracing |
| Application Tests and Settings | |
| LAME MP3 | Version 3.98.3Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160 Kb/s) |
| HandBrake CLI | Version: 0.9.9Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19 GB 4k mkv to x265 mp4 |
| Blender | Version 2.68aBMW 27 CPU Render Benchmark, BMW 27 GPU Render Benchmark |
| 7-Zip | Version 16.02THG-Workload (7.6 GB) to .7z, command line switches "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9" |
| Adobe After Effects CC | Release 2015.3.0, Version 13.8.0.144PCMark driven routine |
| Adobe Photoshop CC | Release 2015.5.0. 20160603.r.88 x64PCMark driven routine (light and heavy) |
| Adobe InDesign CC | Release 2015.4, Build 11.4.0.90 x64PCMark driven routine |
| Adobe Illustrator | Release 2015.3.0, Version 20.0.0 (64-bit)PCMark driven routine |
| Game Tests and Settings | |
| Ashes of Singularity | Version 1.31.21360High Preset - 1920x1080, Mid Shadow Quality, 1x MSAACrazy Preset - 1920x1090, High Shadow Quality, 2x MSAA |
| F1 2015 | 2015 Season, Abu Dhabi Track, RainMedium Preset, No AFxUltra High Preset, 16x AF |
| Metro Last Light Redux | Version 3.00 x64High Quality, 1920x1080, High Tesselation, 16x AFVery High Quality, 1920x1080, Very High Tesselation, 16x AF |
| The Talos Principle | Version 267252Medium Preset, High Quality, High Tesselation, 4x AFUltra Preset, VeryHigh Quality, VeryHigh Tesselation, 16x AF |
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ehmkec Mystic Light works!!! Nah - not for me anyway. I've got a MSI z270 Titaniam MB and MSI GTX 1080to and I have never got Mystic Light to work. Tried today and still my GPU does not show. Sometimes its the MB and not the GPU. Flakey! And what really makes me mad is that Mystic Light does not show up in the Live Update tool list. So I suspect they have not truly supported ML yet. They sure push it though.Reply -
Crashman Reply
Ahah! It's always great to hear from people's experience: The article comment was one of amazement since Mystic Light has been so prone to lockups in previous tests.20634570 said:Mystic Light works!!! Nah - not for me anyway. I've got a MSI z270 Titaniam MB and MSI GTX 1080to and I have never got Mystic Light to work. Tried today and still my GPU does not show. Sometimes its the MB and not the GPU. Flakey! And what really makes me mad is that Mystic Light does not show up in the Live Update tool list. So I suspect they have not truly supported ML yet. They sure push it though.