The Board - A Closer Look

MSI's GAMING motherboards are purposely designed for gaming use; It's built into their DNA. So much so it is printed right into the board's circuits. If you don't find the GAMING circuits, this isn't a GAMING product.


The MSI X99A GAMING PRO CARBON comes with a back-up BIOS you can swap to easily with the flip of the nearby switch should something go wrong with your BIOS. There are also Power and RESET buttons and MSI's GAME BOOST dial, which does some automatic overclocking all the way to eleven :P (in other words, too far for most uses).


There's a built-in dual-digit POST display for diagnosing boot issues as well as four little LEDs by the board's 24-pin power plug that show you the general area a boot fault might be found.


Both the PCH cooler and MOSFET cooler are huge, thick chunks of metal, completely devoid of color expect for a silver dragon on the lower cooler. Both coolers feature carbon fiber-like aesthetic treatments.


Looking at the CPU power area, I noticed some LEDs hanging off the large MOSFET cooler, likely to shine down on that 8-phase design. There's also a cooler on the back of the board, over the rear of the VRM section, to help with dispersing the heat generated by the input drivers if you're pushing your CPU hard.


There are dual-phase DIMM power supplies for each bank of DIMMs, and every one of these specialized features is sandwiched into an 8-layer PCB.


Audio also gets its own treatment with high-end parts, and the required electrical isolation for the Realtek ALC1150 CODEC to perform its best has been provided. There's more to making good audio than just electrically isolating the audio circuit. It'll be interesting to see... uh I mean hear... how the MSI X99A GAMING PRO CARBON really sounds.