MSI 360 Gaming Pro Carbon
A solid but uncompetitive board.
Price $ 209 www.msi.com.au
MSI’s Gaming Pro Carbon motherboards are always strong contenders right in the sweet spot for good features at attractive prices. MSI very aggressively target the gaming market and are perhaps the most ‘gamerfied’ of all the motherboard brands. Like the other contenders in the hotly contested premium B360 market, this is a very important product for MSI. It promises to be another strong Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, though the competition is tough as always. How does it stack up?
The MSI B360 Gaming Pro Carbon looks like a quality product when you first look at it. There are no increasingly common acres of plastic anywhere in sight. There’s a healthy dose of RGB lighting present, with the right side of the board, chipset heatsink and audio PCB separation line all able to be controlled via MSI’s Mystic Light app. If we had to be critical, we’d say the set of radiating lines printed on the lower half of the PCB look a bit plain and out of place. We also note the lack of M.2 drive cooling, somewhat surprising given MSI were the first to push this on many previous generation motherboards. We like the internal Type-C USB header. Type-C is the future and it will certainly become a more common feature on computer cases as we go forward.
The power delivery system is robust and will have no problem powering any Coffee Lake CPU (though of course overclocking is not supported). If Intel decides to release higher core count processors supported by the current generation platform, then this PWM design should easily be capable of powering those as well. The PWM is cooled by large metal heatsinks, though perhaps MSI is cost cutting a bit as the heatsinks have a lot of empty space underneath them. They are adequate though and will not present any limiting factor.
The B360 Gaming Pro Carbon has a very healthy set of I/O ports. There’s a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, one of which is a Type-C along with an additional four Gen 1 ports (provided by an ASMedia controller). Lastly there’s a pair of USB 2.0 ports. Display Port and HDMI ports take care of video capabilities. The single Gigabit LAN port is hooked up to an Intel I219V controller which is a good quality, capable NIC. The audio ports consist of the typical five analogue audio jacks complemented by an S/PDIF optical output. Finally there’ a PS/2 combo port. Like all the other boards here, there is no WiFi, but the good complement of USB ports makes this a very good rounded set of I/O for the MSI.
The MSI UEFI BIOS implementation is always a strong point and the B360 Gaming Pro Carbon doesn’t disappoint. It’s easy to navigate and closely follows MSI’s tradition of logical grouping with a quality feature set. MSI’s Fan control system deserves a mention and again it works well here.
The MSI did largely what we expected in terms of performance, but then it didn’t really stand out. It trailed a little in the game tests, though not by a lot. The difference are always small but it’s better to be leading tests instead of trailing them.
MSI has produced a well-equipped
A couple of little things prevent it from getting on the top step.
motherboard that ticks almost all the boxes, but a couple of little things prevent it from getting on the top step. The PCB printing detracts from a premium look and its performance is just that little bit behind in a couple of places. These are small things, but they are there. It also has the significantly cheaper ASRock Fatal1ty board to fight. In the big picture, the MSi is still a good board. The BIOS is excellent as always and we like the presence of extra USB ports. If you are a fan of MSI, by all means it won’t let you down, but the competition is really tough in this part of the market.