Desktop PC motherboards are often built to be general-purpose platforms, meant to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Other times, OEMs try to enhance a board’s feature set for a specific purpose like gaming or networking. When done right, this can make a board a standout. Take MSI’s MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi: At $369.99, it’s in most respects the epitome of a midrange Intel Z690 motherboard. Its overclocking and networking features are good but not great; the same is true for its power circuitry, audio subsystem, and rear I/O panel. But the MPG shines in a specialized area: storage. With five PCI Express M.2 slots and six SATA-III ports scattered across its surface, this board lets you build a system with reams of high-speed storage. It’s also easy to build out and offers a fast, user-friendly BIOS. It’s one of the best MSI motherboards we’ve seen in years and earns an Editors’ Choice award.
Design: Dragon-Scale ATX
Aesthetically, the MSI MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi is nothing special. The motherboard is attractive, with a dark color scheme and a dragon outline etched into the rear I/O cover, but this has been MSI’s go-to design for years. At a glance, you’d be hard pressed to tell the MPG Z690 Carbon apart from many previous MSI platforms.
MSI’s certainly not alone in reusing the same cosmetic design over and over—almost all board OEMs do—but a splash of color or some original touches would be a welcome change. Fortunately, things improve a bit when you power up the board, with RGB LEDs illuminating behind the dragon logo and over the chipset.
Like many premium motherboards today, the MPG Carbon is heavy, with large heatsinks and heat spreaders. Absolutely no complaints, though—this is simply good practice if you want to avoid overheating. Two large heatsinks connected via a heat pipe reside to the top and left of the CPU socket and provide cooling for a series of 20 75-amp power phases, 18 of which are dedicated to the processor. These power drivers aren’t the best money can buy, but they should be more than adequate to handle any LGA1700 processor even with some overclocking.
One noteworthy aspect of the topmost heatsink is the way in which it’s angled. The right side of this heatsink goes diagonal and is pulled back from the CPU fan headers at the top of the board, which make the fan headers some of the easiest to access that you’ll find on any motherboard. The heatsink then curves around the CPU power connectors, so it still can be a slight hurdle to plugging in the power connection, but overall the heatsink is about as out of the way as it can be. This makes the building process considerably easier than with some less well-thought-out boards.
Further down the board is another large heatsink that covers the Z690 chipset. This makes direct contact to one of three heat spreaders that cover most of the bottom half of the board. Beneath these are a total of five M.2 Key-M slots for storage—the most we’ve seen on a motherboard to date.
MSI opted to forgo having any PCI Express x1 slots, instead placing three PCI Express x16 slots on the board. The first two are configured to work with the CPU’s PCI Express 5.0 lanes and can be used for a multi-GPU configuration. The third slot is significantly slower, with just a PCI Express 3.0 x4 connection going to the chipset, but this is adequate for many devices.
A Look at the Networking and Audio
The networking hardware of the MSI Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi is standard stuff. An Intel i225V chip is on hand for wired networking devices, supporting a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps. MSI didn’t need to add a Wi-Fi chip to the board, as Intel’s Z690 chipset includes an integrated AX211 Wi-Fi controller that can handle up to 2.4Gbps of bandwidth. At the moment this is a relatively fast Wi-Fi controller and leaves little reason for motherboard makers to shell out for alternative wireless components.
While there’s not much to complain about in terms of networking, neither is there much room for praise. As I said, this hardware configuration is quite standard; you can find plenty of Intel motherboards with the very same setup. Networking specialists should note that there are some similarly priced midrange motherboards with 5Gbps NICs; they may make tradeoffs compared to the MSI in other areas, but if wired networking performance is a priority, you may want to check them out.
For the audio subsystem, MSI chose Realtek’s relatively new ALC4080 audio codec. We started to see motherboards with this chip about a year ago, and it’s slowly becoming more common on high-end boards. The ALC4080 has few advantages over Realtek’s older and much more widely used ALC1220 codec, but it does support a higher 384KHz sampling rate that gives it a slight edge on paper. The audio hardware is segmented from the other motherboard components by a layer of PCB void of any electrical traces, which should help reduce EMI. Seven fairly small electrolytic capacitors are attached to the audio traces, which is a little thin compared to some beefier audio solutions we’ve seen.
MSI opted to use the Realtek ALC4080 codec for the front audio headers as well. This differs from some competing motherboards like the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero and the Asrock Z690 Taichi that feature dedicated audio hardware for the front panel. The latter is supposed to provide a superior audio experience if you’re using high-quality headphones, but naturally adds to the cost. (Both of those boards are priced about $200 higher than the MSI MPG Carbon.) Personally, I feel the single-chip solution is more practical as you’re unlikely to hear a significant difference without deluxe headphones, and if you do own premium headphones you’ve probably invested in fancier audio hardware as well.
Storage Options and Rear I/O
If there’s anywhere that MSI went above and beyond with the MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi, it’s with the motherboard’s storage solution. At this point, M.2 devices have all but taken over the storage market. Hard drives and larger 2.5-inch solid-state drives may linger on for many years for users that need tons of storage space, but their superior speed makes M.2 NVMe SSDs by far the best solution for virtually everyone.
Due to the rise of M.2 storage devices, virtually every motherboard today has one or two M.2 slots and quite a few have three, but the MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi is the first I’ve seen with five. All but one are configured to use a PCI Express 4.0 x4 connection with roughly 7.87GBps of bandwidth. The one port that isn’t configured for PCIe 4.0 has a PCIe 3.0 x4 connection that tops out at closer to 4GBps. The large number of slots makes it easier than ever for you to install several terabytes of high-speed storage.
If you need even more storage, the MSI also provides a total of six SATA-III ports. Four of these run off the Z690 chipset, with the other two connected to an ASMedia ASM1061 controller. Almost all of these storage connections can be utilized at the same time, with only one SATA port and the slower PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot sharing data connections. This makes the MPG Z690 Carbon an exceptional board if you have heavy storage needs.
The rear I/O panel is about what you’d expect from a modern motherboard. You get a total of nine USB Type-A ports and a single USB Type-C port, along with five 3.5mm audio jacks, an S/PDIF optical jack, two antenna connections, the Ethernet port, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, and a button for flashing the BIOS.
Overall I consider this to be a good mixture of ports, but there is one thing that could use some improvement—the USB ports. Of the nine Type-A ports, five follow the USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps spec, but the remaining four are USB 2.0 antiques. I don’t have any complaints in general about OEMs continuing to put USB 2.0 ports on motherboards—their bandwidth is perfectly adequate for peripherals and I often find them more reliable to use in the BIOS—but four seems like a few too many.
If you’re trying to blindly plug in a USB device, having nearly half the USB-A ports as USB 2.0 increases the chances you’ll accidentally plug your device into a bog-slow port by mistake. The Z690 chipset is certainly capable of supporting two more USB 3.2 ports on the rear I/O panel, which would have been a better option. I don’t want to belabor the point, but it’s a minor annoyance. For the record, the lone USB-C port is an ultra-fast USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port with 20Gbps of bandwidth.
A Brief Look at the BIOS
Most modern motherboards ship with two user interfaces or menus for the BIOS: an easy mode for beginners and quick changes, and an advanced mode for everything else. I’ve been complaining for years about vendors’ annoying habit of configuring their boards to boot straight into the advanced mode, which renders the easy mode essentially a useless waste of space, but I’m happy to see that OEMs seem to be mending their ways.
The MSI MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi boots straight into its easy interface, just as it should. In design, it’s similar to the BIOS of other recent MSI motherboards, giving you the right amount of control without overdoing it. From here you can see system specs and operating conditions, adjust the boot order, flash the BIOS, enable RAID, set memory profile, and enable or disable the auto-overclocking CPU feature. This is quite a lot and really helps reduce the need for you to enter the advanced menu at all. Everything is also cleanly laid out, which is invaluable as this array of options otherwise might be confusing to novices.
The advanced mode has too many features to cover in detail here, but the most important is a flock of overclocking options. These allow you to adjust the clock speed of various parts of the system including the P- and E-cores of “Alder Lake” CPUs, the ring ratio, and the graphics core speed. You’ll also find options for overclocking the RAM and adjusting power. The BIOS felt exceptionally fast and navigating tabs felt very smooth and fluid.
A Few Extras
Most motherboard extras aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, but they’re still nice to have at times. MSI typically does well in this area, as my growing pile of MSI flash drives and brushes will attest. Like many higher-end MSI motherboards, the MPG comes with a 16GB USB flash drive loaded with drivers to help get your system online.
This is especially helpful if you don’t have another system from which to download newer drivers, and it’s far better than including a drink coaster (sorry, CD) that most PCs today can’t use. The dusting brush and key ring with screwdrivers are nice little bonuses, though the screwdrivers are almost too short to use.
Managing to Stand Out
When you review motherboards day in and day out, you’d think that after a while they’d start to blend together. For some boards, this is true, but you’d be surprised at how a well-built motherboard can still set itself apart. The extent to which the MSI MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi does so is hard to quantify, but suffice it to say that it’s by far the best-balanced and planned MSI motherboard we’ve reviewed in some time.
It’s a little difficult to compare this board head-to-head against the other Z690 motherboards we’ve tested; both the Asrock Z690 Taichi and Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Hero, as mentioned, cost about $200 more than the MSI and have superior components for overclocking plus a few extra frills. Any of the three can make an argument as to being your best bet, but if we were building an ATX-size Alder Lake system today that puts practical considerations (notably, storage expansion and solid connectivity) first and raw overclock potential second, we’d choose the MPG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi.
