MSI MPG Z590 Gaming Carbon Wi-Fi
A balanced all-rounder.
The MSI MPG Gaming Carbon sits right in the middle of its Z590 product stack, below the expensive flagship MEG boards and above the affordable MAG range. Its upper mid-range positioning aims to strike a nice balance of affordability while including the important features that a typical gamer really needs.
The Gaming Carbon reminds of an 80’s boom box with its spectrum analyser theme. It’s a bit of a take it or leave it kind of design. We like the way that MSI has incorporated the design into the heatsink assembly, which has the dual benefit of adding surface area, which is needed for a hungrier 11th Gen CPU like the 11900K.
Storage functionality is atypical for a Z590 board three M.2 slots, the topmost of which runs at PCIe 4.0. They are joined by six SATA ports.
A real strength of the Z590 Gaming Carbon is its 16-phase VRM with 75a power stages. It can’t quite match the VRM of the Aorus Master but an overclocked 11900K will run into cooling limitations before the board itself is stressed. It’s a bit sad that boards need power delivery systems like the ones we’re seeing on Z590 boards. Efficiency is not Rocket Lake’s strong point to put it mildly.
The rear I/O is very impressive. You get a total of ten USB ports consisting of a Type- C USB 3.2 Gen2x2 port, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. The new Realtek ALC 4080 codec powers the standard set of audio ports which includes S/PDIF. The MSI’s ticks the right boxes with regards to it’s networking, thanks to Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE and AX210 Wi-Fi 6E controllers. DP and HDMI ports are useful should you need to use the Xe graphics on a Rocket Lake CPU.
The performance of the MSI was interesting. It proved to be very strong at multi-threading but it pays a price to do it. The MSI was the most power hungry of the boards, in fact it can consume over 300w under an adaptive boost AVX load. If you plan to run this board, you’ll need to make sure you have top shelf cooling unless you hop into the BIOS to moderate the power settings. These settings are easy to find thanks to MSI’s long running and mature BIOS design.
The MSI with its strong VRM and heatsink assembly didn’t break a sweat under a heavy Adaptive Boost load. Although it was one of the warmer running boards we’ve tested, at 69c the temperatures aren’t a cause for any concern. Unless you win the silicon lottery, at 5.2GHz with all cores loaded the power consumption can jump to over 350w! Yes you read it right. The MSI handled it with ease.
The MSI Z590 Gaming Carbon really appeals thanks to its balance of relative affordability and quality features, particularly its strong VRM, networking and I/O. It’s at the right spot on the price/features curve. If you added 10G LAN, a Thunderbolt controller and a water block and it would be double the price. The MSI hits just the right balance.