MSI Z270i Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. MSI Carbon AC: Packaging and Bundle3. MSI Carbon AC: Board Layout and Features4. MSI Carbon AC: UEFI5. MSI Carbon AC: Software6. Testing Methodology7. Tests: CPU Related8. Tests: Memory Related9. Tests: Gaming Related10. Overclocking & Power Consumption11. Tests: Motherboard Features Performance12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark is a Windows-based utility for testing storage performance of any storage drive or controller. We use the default benchmark setup.

M.2 PCIe Performance

For M.2 testing we use a Toshiba OCZ RD400 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.

USB Performance

We test USB 3.0 and 3.1 performance using a pair of Transcend SSD370S 512GB SSDs in RAID 0 connected to an Icy Box RD2253-U31 2-bay USB 3.1 enclosure powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R controller.

SATA 6Gbps Performance

For SATA 6Gbps testing we use an OCZ Trion 150 480GB SSD.

Storage performance across M.2, SATA and USB revealed no anomalies.

Audio

Rightmark Audio Analyser is a freeware benchmarking utility designed to objectively test the performance characteristics of audio solutions. We setup a line-in line-out loop and execute the record/playback test before generating the results report you see below. A sampling mode of 24-bit, 192 kHz was tested.

MSI's Z270i Gaming Pro Carbon AC scored Excellent in 6 categories, Very Good in one and Good in one for an overall score of Very Good. It's in the middle of our results for Z270 motherboards all based on the same ALC1220 codec.

Out of the box audio performance is very good and the integrated headphone amplifier of Realtek's new codec helps a great deal in that regard. The Nahimic software offers end-users additional granularity in customising the audio experience but the take-home here is that the onboard audio is more than good enough for most users.

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