Finished Looks

The MSI MPG Z690 Carbon EK X aesthetic shares the same neutral blacks mixed with green accents on the chipset and M.2 heatsinks as on the Z690 Carbon WiFi because it is the same motherboard. When powered on, the MSI dragon logo and "Carbon EK X" have full RGB support, allowing the user to change it to anything they desire. Probably the biggest eye catcher is the massive monoblock which is front and center of the system build. Paired with an MSI watercooled video card, not staring at it all day long will be hard.

Test System

Supporting Hardware

Testing is performed with the newest available version of the BIOS at the time. All BIOS settings related to the CPU are left untouched. XMP is enabled for the memory. However, if the primary, secondary or tertiary memory timings are incorrectly set by the BIOS, it is tested as-is to mimic a standard user. The same goes for the CPU. Unless it is a bug in the current BIOS—i.e., not present in other versions—any and all CPU boost parameters are left alone.