Board Layout

MSI has really tightened up the "carbon" look of this series of boards with carbon-fiber-looking bits all over. The board is mostly devoid of any color at all otherwise. There are many screws protruding from the back of the board; the heatsinks for the MSI Z370 GAMING PRO CARBON AC are also ready for removal if you want to go full water-cooling.


The socket area of this motherboard is fairly cramped, with capacitors and such very close to the socket in all directions, but even so, there is plenty of clearance for pretty much any cooler you might want to use. The DIMM slots are clad in metal to aid in EMI elimination while adding some strength to the slots for long-term deployments in tough thermal environments.


You get two M.2 ports on the MSI Z370 GAMING PRO CARBON AC, with the upper slot carrying MSI's own M.2 shield to help deal with those hotter PCIe drives, while the bottom slot has no cooler and is also a bit shorter in length.


The PCIe expansion slots offered by the MSI Z370 GAMING PRO CARBON AC consist of three PCIe x16 slots and three PCIe x1 slots. The x16 slots are very standard in their connectivity, with the bottom slot connected to the chipset and always capable of a x4 electrical link.


The board's bottom edge has your standard USB and audio headers, along with RGB LED connections and a couple of SATA ports.


Rear I/O duties are cared for with a total of eight USB ports of varying flavors, as well as DisplayPort, HDMI, audio plugs, a LAN port, and a PS/2 port to round it all out. This board could use a couple more USB ports on its rear, but eight is most definitely sufficient. The LAN port is powered via the Intel controller pictured above.