Board Layout

The MSI MPG Z690 Carbon EK X has the MSI dragon logo over the rear IO cover, which normally sits above the VRM heatsink. However, since this is a watercooled edition, the heatsink is missing entirely. Turn it around and the back has warning zones showing possible conflicts with cases and where the standoff should be placed.


The MSI MPG Z690 Carbon EK X offers three PCI Express x16 slots, with the top two reinforced for extra stress support. PCIe slot one and two are PCIe Gen5 with a total of x16 lanes coming from the CPU. Slot one can either operate at x16 or x8. Slot 2 is wired for PCIe Gen5 x8 and will split the available lanes with the first slot if populated. The third slot is also physically x16, but internally wired for x4 PCIe Gen3.


There are five M.2 sockets on the MSI MPG Z690 Carbon EK X, four of which are Gen4 x4. The one nearest the LGA 1700 socket touches the monoblock when installed and has thermal tape on the motherboard for maximum cooling capacity. The remaining Gen4 M.2 sockets feature full-coverage heatsinks. This leaves a single M.2 below the Carbon EL X logo as the only Gen3 x4 socket.


If for some reason the jumper used for clearing the CMOS does not work, you can of course unplug the battery hidden away below the rear IO cover.


The board has a total of six SATA 6 Gb/s ports on the side, angled 90 degrees from the board. MSI decided to label the four SATA ports coming from the Z690 chipset as 5–8 and the other two SATA A/B; the latter two go to a separate ASM 1061 SATA controller. When the Gen3 M.2 socket is in use, these two SATA ports connected to the ASM 1061 controller will be disabled.


The MSI MPG Z690 Carbon EK X more or less has the standard assortment of ports for a Z690 motherboard including an optical S/PDIF Out port, Wi-Fi 6E, and 2.5 Gb LAN. It is nice to see extra USB 2.0 ports for peripherals like a keyboard, mouse, USB headphones, and game controller. All of these generally do not consume enough bandwidth to warrant the 10 Gbps ports on these devices.

• Flash BIOS button
• 1x DisplayPort
• 1x HDMI 2.1 port
• 5x USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps Type-A ports
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps Type-C port
• 1x Intel 2.5G Ethernet
• 2x Wi-Fi antenna connectors
• 5x audio jacks
• Optical S/PDIF Out port