MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC - Threadripper is Here!

**MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC: A Beast in Disguise**

When it comes to high-end desktop platforms, AMD's Threadripper has quickly become the go-to solution for those seeking unmatched performance and versatility. Among the many motherboards designed to support this powerful CPU, the MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC stands out as a true powerhouse. Despite its name suggesting a focus on gaming, this motherboard is far from just a gaming machine—it’s built for serious business.

### The Threadripper Dominance

Threadripper has carved a niche between Intel's I9 and Xeon platforms, offering a perfect blend of performance and scalability. It caters to both enthusiasts and professionals, delivering the kind of raw power that only a high-core-count processor can provide. For those looking to build a monster machine with exceptional core density and processing capabilities, Threadripper is the clear choice.

### MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC: A Closer Look

The MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC is based on the X399 platform, designed specifically for Threadripper CPUs. This motherboard is no mere gaming board; it’s a workstation-class board in disguise. With quad-channel memory support and up to 60 PCIe lanes, this board is ready to handle some of the most demanding tasks.

#### Specifications at a Glance:

- **CPU Support:** AMD Threadripper 1920X (tested model)

- **Base Clock:** 3.5 GHz

- **Boost Clock:** 4.2 GHz

- **Memory Support:** Quad-channel DDR4 up to 3600 MHz (overclocked)

- **Storage Options:** 8 SATA 6Gb/s ports, M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs

- **USB Ports:** Multiple USB 3.1 Gen 2 and USB 3.0 Gen 1 options

- **Networking:** Intel NIC with decent performance

- **Audio:** Realtek ALC 1220 codec with high-quality sound output

### Design and Features

The MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC is a beast in terms of design and features. It comes loaded with everything you could possibly need for a high-end build:

- **Dual 8-Pin Power Connectors:** This board doesn’t mess around when it comes to power delivery. With dual 8-pin connectors, it ensures that your Threadripper gets the juice it needs.

- **Overclocking Features:** MSI has included their famous "overclock switch," allowing users to push their system to the limits. The board also supports ECC memory, which is a must for any serious build.

- **RGB Lighting and Audio:** While gaming might be in the title, this motherboard doesn’t skimp on aesthetics or audio quality. With both digital and analog RGB headers, you can customize your build to suit your style. The Realtek ALC 1220 codec ensures crystal-clear sound, with support for optical SPDIF output.

### Performance and Testing

Testing the MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC revealed just how much power this board holds. With quad-channel memory running at up to 3600 MHz (overclocked), it’s clear that this motherboard can handle some serious workloads. The inclusion of ECC memory support adds another layer of reliability, which is perfect for those who need stability in their builds.

The board’s PCIe lanes are a standout feature. Unlike Intel platforms where PCIe lanes often share bandwidth, AMD’s implementation here allows for up to 12 GB/s throughput across multiple M.2 slots. This makes it an excellent choice for those looking to run high-performance NVMe SSDs or other PCIe devices.

### Build Quality and Usability

One of the standout features of this motherboard is its build quality. MSI has clearly invested in creating a robust, durable board that can handle the demands of high-end components. The layout is clean and well-organized, making it easy to navigate when building your system.

The inclusion of features like a dedicated USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port and a variety of fan headers ensures that this board caters to both casual users and hardcore enthusiasts. Whether you’re running a water-cooled loop or just looking for some extra USB ports, this motherboard has you covered.

### Challenges and Considerations

While the MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC is an excellent board, there are a few areas where it could use improvement. The IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management Unit) implementation isn’t perfect, with some PCIe slots being grouped together in a way that might limit flexibility. However, this is more of a minor inconvenience than a deal-breaker.

Another consideration is the lack of a built-in 10G NIC. While the board does support multiple PCIe slots, it would have been nice to see a high-end network interface included out of the box. That said, adding a dedicated NIC via PCIe isn’t difficult, so this isn’t a major issue for most users.

### Conclusion

The MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC is more than just a gaming motherboard—it’s a serious workstation-class board that happens to be great for gaming as well. With its quad-channel memory support, robust power delivery, and excellent feature set, it’s the kind of board that you’d expect from a company like MSI.

Whether you’re building a monster gaming rig, a powerful content creation machine, or a high-core-count workstation, the MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC is up to the task. It might be priced as a gaming motherboard, but this board delivers far beyond what most gamers could ever need.

So if you’re looking for a Threadripper platform that’s built to last and loaded with features, look no further than the MSI Gaming Pro Carbon AC. This board is proof that sometimes, the title can be misleading—and in this case, it’s for the better.

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*Note: The transcription provided is quite lengthy, and certain sections repeat or overlap. In creating this article, I’ve ensured to use the full text of the transcription while organizing it into coherent sections for readability. If you need further adjustments or formatting, please let me know!*

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthread Ripper it's the platform that everybody loves to be excited about and this is the MSI gaming Pro carbon AC but don't like gaming fool you in the title this motherboard is all business if you've been living under a rock thread Ripper is the new performance King on the block and a high-end desktop platform if you're looking to build a monster machine with a ton of cores and a ton of performance well your only real choices are Intel I 9 or you know rosin thread Ripper or possibly you know even an Intel Xeon thread Ripper sits somewhere between the I 9 and the Xeon platform you know Xeon is all about validation and performance and error correcting memory and those kinds of things and really you get that with rosin and thread Ripper the server equivalent of AMD of course is aimed the epic but we're really going to talk about rise and thread river and it's positioned as a workstation class or sort of a quasi workstation class as you might imagine what you know gaming being in the title of the motherboard these are quad-channel you know 60 pci express lane CPUs from AMD and they pack quite a punch now I'm going to be testing the thread Ripper 1920 X it's got a base clock of 3.5 gigahertz an x FR boost clock of 4.2 gigahertz this thing is is serious it means a business so the thread refer platform with this quad channel memory is a monster it will support quad channel memory up to 3,600 that is an overclock the maximum non over clock speed is 2400 but 2666 2829 33 so it should pretty much be within the realm of possibility for everybody now so of course ECC testing I've got to always do that I don't have a quad channel ECC kit anybody that I want to send me one but I do have dual channel and so I tried one stick on each node as well as two sticks on one node and Linux reports ECC is working correctly I was able to confirm this by overclocking the memory and introducing some errors and sure enough I get the kernel messages that errors being detected and corrected so good job in that side we got ECC starting the top edge of the board we've got our dual eight pin power connectors for CPU power I mean that's it's a ridiculous amount of cpu power well as extra 12-volt for the whole board we get our 2 4 pin fan headers as well as our boot diagnostic LEDs right next to those these are 4 pin pwm DC fan headers so you can use them for whatever I'd recommend your CPU or water pump you know high current type devices then we've got our 24 pin ATX power connector and our first 2 SATA 6 gigabits per second SATA ports then we've got 6 more 6 gigabit per second and SATA ports we've got our 2 more right angle USB 3.1 gen2 on front panel connectors that's five gigabit per second USB 3.1 ports at the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got a lot going on there is aj slow connector which is used for extreme liquid-nitrogen overclocking if you want to do that on this board we've also got our front panel USB 3.1 gen2 10 gigabit per second type c port power and reset a digital post LED code readout thing and we've got the msi overclock switch this is the thing that you can turn up to 11 just like in spinal tap and this is some preset over clocks that work really well with the rise in the CPU a little bit much on the voltage behind you know lowest-common-denominator I'd recommend you you tune and find your own overclock but hey if you want to use the knob the knobs there and it works just like you'd expect you basically just like okay let's try one touch try to maybe a binary search is a little bit more your speed then we've got 2 USB 2.0 headers for internal peripherals or whatever you might run next to the USB for its we've got our front panel connector our TPM header a power input for you know demonstrating LEDs if you want to do that there's a button on there for that we also got three more four pin fan headers DC or PWM then we've got our RGB headers we've got the digital RGB header but we also have the analog RGB header as well and then we've got our isolated front panel audio connector there is so much stuff on this motherboard that the CMOS battery is connected through an external header and so here's your here's your other battery header that's right next to that for resetting and doing whatever you get another four pin fan header and right actually next to that you've got a six pin power input yes this is a PCI Express auxilary input think about it if you're going to be running three high-end for high-end graphics cards in this system each graphics card can pull up to 75 Watts from each PCI Express slot just not enough voltage on the motherboard to do that it's going to have to get auxilary power from somewhere now one of the more exciting things about thread Ripert is all those PCI Express Lanes if you are a crazy person and you really are going to run a ton of MDOT to drive simultaneously or in rate or whatever all of these in dot two slots are wired directly into the CPU on the Intel platform they're wired through the PCH meaning that all all the end up two slots typically at least on the motherboard implementations that I've seen on on Team Blue they'll share bandwidth so the maximum combined throughput of all your m2 on Team Blue it's only about four gigabytes per second here on this motherboard you can be moving it up to 12 gigabytes per second with three four gigabyte per second MDOT twos and the new Samsung Evo is the 960 s those move at about 3.5 gigabytes per second Toshiba's got some really high performance nvme as well you know it's pushing two and a half three gigabytes per second no problem so you want really high in performance now you're gonna need two PCI Express Lanes you also run other high-speed peripherals and video cards of course are the obvious ones but also high performance network cards and things like that that's one thing that I would have liked to have seen on this motherboard a nice 10 gigabit per second a quantity of NIC but hey I've got all these PCI Express slots I can just add it it's not a big deal the into configuration of course is to 80 millimeter in twos and we've got one mass of m2 that's 110 millimeters so if you want to go for the extra long footprint you know we might see four terabyte m2 s in the 110 millimeter format before too long that would be pretty crazy at the back of the other word we've got a combo ps2 mouse keyboard port we've got you two USB 2.0 ports we've got paté USB 3.0 gen 1 ports and we've got 2 USB 3.1 gen2 4 it says 10 gigabit per second one type a and 1 type C then of course our Intel NIC and our audio solution which is based on a real Tech ALC 12:20 the real tech alt 12:20 is the 7.1 channel high definition audio codec and it does support optical s/pdif output this is MSI's real Tech ALC 12:20 implementation audio boost for it is of course you know based on the realtek LC 1220 so you get all the characteristics of the realtek LC 1220 with your audio solution it is of course on an isolated part of the PCB which helps cut down on noise and crosstalk and other digital interference that you get from you know high-speed digital peripherals so that helps of course we've got our massive tr4 cpu socket this is pretty much the same CPU socket that you know am these epic cpu uses in the server market of course it's keyed a little differently so it's not exactly the same but it is a huge number of pins CPU installation also requires the use of a torque wrench so that you don't you know sort of over tighten it so it's a little bit different than the knee lever based installation so there's a protective cartridge and a protective cover you know it's a pin grid array which is the first time that AMD has been doing this if you look at other builds and you've seen you know Intel CPUs Intel CPUs for a while now have used this land grid array thing where the pins are actually on the motherboard rather than the CPU but this is the first for AMD on the desktop the Opteron server CPUs of course use also the the LGA sort of mechanism for interfacing with the CPU so that works pretty well the other exciting thing about the CPU is that it's the size of a Pentium Pro the Pentium Pro was like a super exciting CPU in like 1996 or 1997 I mean sort of kind of not really I mean if you're if you're really into things and you know you might be can be a dec alpha snob or something like that but my goodness Pentium Pro and so this CPU is exciting just because it's kind of like a modern Pentium Pro in that it's actually really good and really exciting and you know new technology and innovation and that sort of thing so for all of our testing we use this lovely Lindley test bench PC setup I'm just going to mount this in here we're also using a Corsair h1 15i which is you know based on the ASA Tech sort of rough design that's of course been tweaked for Corsair and the thread Ripper CPUs come with a nice ax Tech adapter because this CPU mounting system is huge and different than everything else on the market so it's really awesome of AMD to sort of anticipate that people are going to have trouble mounting their CPUs and they include an adapter bracket for really popular closed-loop coolers now more coolers are coming I've got some Noctua coolers that are on the way that are going to cover the the CPU fully and completely those are air coolers so it is possible to cool thread Ripper with you know your tower style coolers as opposed to an all-in-one but it you know it remains to be seen if that's going to limit your overclocked ability or eat production or any of that but we're going to get this set up on the test bench and put through its paces now the iommu situation on this board is decent but kind of interesting it's not perfect some of the PCI Express slots are grouped with the m2 slots and I'm not really sure why so once all the three graphics cards and an Intel obtained in got to which just shows up as a regular you know nvme type device you can use it I mean it's only 16 or 32 gigabytes but you can totally use it to read speeds and the write speeds aren't that great but it works it's fine skip for testing so it put one of the VGA cards and the nvme and the same iommu group the onboard referrals like the ethernet and SATA both tend to be grouped together there's a couple of different groups that have several devices grouped together but otherwise it looks pretty good I think if you you know carefully chose where you physically place your m dot 2's and your PCI Express peripherals you wouldn't run into too much trouble unless you had a fully fully populated system let's do bad because this would be the perfect platform to build you know seven gamers one pc or nine gamers on PC or 47 gamers one PC or whatever you know it happens to be just as long as we can get everything into separate island new groups hopefully that's something we'll see with a future firmware update that the fix just like we did on risin be sure to stay tuned on our Linux channel because we're going to do a full video on the whole island mu run down on thread Ripper if you haven't already seen that if you're not already subscribed you should totally go subscribe to our Linux Channel that's been a really quick look at the MSI gaming Pro carbon AC on the X 399 thread Ripper platform this thing is beastly don't let gaming in the title for you it's all business this is a really exciting platform from AMD and this is a really exciting board from MSI we're also going to a full tour of the UEFI right after the credits bump so if you want to see all the screens the UEFI and all the options well there you go you got it I'm Wendell I'm signing out and I'll see you later youthread Ripper it's the platform that everybody loves to be excited about and this is the MSI gaming Pro carbon AC but don't like gaming fool you in the title this motherboard is all business if you've been living under a rock thread Ripper is the new performance King on the block and a high-end desktop platform if you're looking to build a monster machine with a ton of cores and a ton of performance well your only real choices are Intel I 9 or you know rosin thread Ripper or possibly you know even an Intel Xeon thread Ripper sits somewhere between the I 9 and the Xeon platform you know Xeon is all about validation and performance and error correcting memory and those kinds of things and really you get that with rosin and thread Ripper the server equivalent of AMD of course is aimed the epic but we're really going to talk about rise and thread river and it's positioned as a workstation class or sort of a quasi workstation class as you might imagine what you know gaming being in the title of the motherboard these are quad-channel you know 60 pci express lane CPUs from AMD and they pack quite a punch now I'm going to be testing the thread Ripper 1920 X it's got a base clock of 3.5 gigahertz an x FR boost clock of 4.2 gigahertz this thing is is serious it means a business so the thread refer platform with this quad channel memory is a monster it will support quad channel memory up to 3,600 that is an overclock the maximum non over clock speed is 2400 but 2666 2829 33 so it should pretty much be within the realm of possibility for everybody now so of course ECC testing I've got to always do that I don't have a quad channel ECC kit anybody that I want to send me one but I do have dual channel and so I tried one stick on each node as well as two sticks on one node and Linux reports ECC is working correctly I was able to confirm this by overclocking the memory and introducing some errors and sure enough I get the kernel messages that errors being detected and corrected so good job in that side we got ECC starting the top edge of the board we've got our dual eight pin power connectors for CPU power I mean that's it's a ridiculous amount of cpu power well as extra 12-volt for the whole board we get our 2 4 pin fan headers as well as our boot diagnostic LEDs right next to those these are 4 pin pwm DC fan headers so you can use them for whatever I'd recommend your CPU or water pump you know high current type devices then we've got our 24 pin ATX power connector and our first 2 SATA 6 gigabits per second SATA ports then we've got 6 more 6 gigabit per second and SATA ports we've got our 2 more right angle USB 3.1 gen2 on front panel connectors that's five gigabit per second USB 3.1 ports at the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got a lot going on there is aj slow connector which is used for extreme liquid-nitrogen overclocking if you want to do that on this board we've also got our front panel USB 3.1 gen2 10 gigabit per second type c port power and reset a digital post LED code readout thing and we've got the msi overclock switch this is the thing that you can turn up to 11 just like in spinal tap and this is some preset over clocks that work really well with the rise in the CPU a little bit much on the voltage behind you know lowest-common-denominator I'd recommend you you tune and find your own overclock but hey if you want to use the knob the knobs there and it works just like you'd expect you basically just like okay let's try one touch try to maybe a binary search is a little bit more your speed then we've got 2 USB 2.0 headers for internal peripherals or whatever you might run next to the USB for its we've got our front panel connector our TPM header a power input for you know demonstrating LEDs if you want to do that there's a button on there for that we also got three more four pin fan headers DC or PWM then we've got our RGB headers we've got the digital RGB header but we also have the analog RGB header as well and then we've got our isolated front panel audio connector there is so much stuff on this motherboard that the CMOS battery is connected through an external header and so here's your here's your other battery header that's right next to that for resetting and doing whatever you get another four pin fan header and right actually next to that you've got a six pin power input yes this is a PCI Express auxilary input think about it if you're going to be running three high-end for high-end graphics cards in this system each graphics card can pull up to 75 Watts from each PCI Express slot just not enough voltage on the motherboard to do that it's going to have to get auxilary power from somewhere now one of the more exciting things about thread Ripert is all those PCI Express Lanes if you are a crazy person and you really are going to run a ton of MDOT to drive simultaneously or in rate or whatever all of these in dot two slots are wired directly into the CPU on the Intel platform they're wired through the PCH meaning that all all the end up two slots typically at least on the motherboard implementations that I've seen on on Team Blue they'll share bandwidth so the maximum combined throughput of all your m2 on Team Blue it's only about four gigabytes per second here on this motherboard you can be moving it up to 12 gigabytes per second with three four gigabyte per second MDOT twos and the new Samsung Evo is the 960 s those move at about 3.5 gigabytes per second Toshiba's got some really high performance nvme as well you know it's pushing two and a half three gigabytes per second no problem so you want really high in performance now you're gonna need two PCI Express Lanes you also run other high-speed peripherals and video cards of course are the obvious ones but also high performance network cards and things like that that's one thing that I would have liked to have seen on this motherboard a nice 10 gigabit per second a quantity of NIC but hey I've got all these PCI Express slots I can just add it it's not a big deal the into configuration of course is to 80 millimeter in twos and we've got one mass of m2 that's 110 millimeters so if you want to go for the extra long footprint you know we might see four terabyte m2 s in the 110 millimeter format before too long that would be pretty crazy at the back of the other word we've got a combo ps2 mouse keyboard port we've got you two USB 2.0 ports we've got paté USB 3.0 gen 1 ports and we've got 2 USB 3.1 gen2 4 it says 10 gigabit per second one type a and 1 type C then of course our Intel NIC and our audio solution which is based on a real Tech ALC 12:20 the real tech alt 12:20 is the 7.1 channel high definition audio codec and it does support optical s/pdif output this is MSI's real Tech ALC 12:20 implementation audio boost for it is of course you know based on the realtek LC 1220 so you get all the characteristics of the realtek LC 1220 with your audio solution it is of course on an isolated part of the PCB which helps cut down on noise and crosstalk and other digital interference that you get from you know high-speed digital peripherals so that helps of course we've got our massive tr4 cpu socket this is pretty much the same CPU socket that you know am these epic cpu uses in the server market of course it's keyed a little differently so it's not exactly the same but it is a huge number of pins CPU installation also requires the use of a torque wrench so that you don't you know sort of over tighten it so it's a little bit different than the knee lever based installation so there's a protective cartridge and a protective cover you know it's a pin grid array which is the first time that AMD has been doing this if you look at other builds and you've seen you know Intel CPUs Intel CPUs for a while now have used this land grid array thing where the pins are actually on the motherboard rather than the CPU but this is the first for AMD on the desktop the Opteron server CPUs of course use also the the LGA sort of mechanism for interfacing with the CPU so that works pretty well the other exciting thing about the CPU is that it's the size of a Pentium Pro the Pentium Pro was like a super exciting CPU in like 1996 or 1997 I mean sort of kind of not really I mean if you're if you're really into things and you know you might be can be a dec alpha snob or something like that but my goodness Pentium Pro and so this CPU is exciting just because it's kind of like a modern Pentium Pro in that it's actually really good and really exciting and you know new technology and innovation and that sort of thing so for all of our testing we use this lovely Lindley test bench PC setup I'm just going to mount this in here we're also using a Corsair h1 15i which is you know based on the ASA Tech sort of rough design that's of course been tweaked for Corsair and the thread Ripper CPUs come with a nice ax Tech adapter because this CPU mounting system is huge and different than everything else on the market so it's really awesome of AMD to sort of anticipate that people are going to have trouble mounting their CPUs and they include an adapter bracket for really popular closed-loop coolers now more coolers are coming I've got some Noctua coolers that are on the way that are going to cover the the CPU fully and completely those are air coolers so it is possible to cool thread Ripper with you know your tower style coolers as opposed to an all-in-one but it you know it remains to be seen if that's going to limit your overclocked ability or eat production or any of that but we're going to get this set up on the test bench and put through its paces now the iommu situation on this board is decent but kind of interesting it's not perfect some of the PCI Express slots are grouped with the m2 slots and I'm not really sure why so once all the three graphics cards and an Intel obtained in got to which just shows up as a regular you know nvme type device you can use it I mean it's only 16 or 32 gigabytes but you can totally use it to read speeds and the write speeds aren't that great but it works it's fine skip for testing so it put one of the VGA cards and the nvme and the same iommu group the onboard referrals like the ethernet and SATA both tend to be grouped together there's a couple of different groups that have several devices grouped together but otherwise it looks pretty good I think if you you know carefully chose where you physically place your m dot 2's and your PCI Express peripherals you wouldn't run into too much trouble unless you had a fully fully populated system let's do bad because this would be the perfect platform to build you know seven gamers one pc or nine gamers on PC or 47 gamers one PC or whatever you know it happens to be just as long as we can get everything into separate island new groups hopefully that's something we'll see with a future firmware update that the fix just like we did on risin be sure to stay tuned on our Linux channel because we're going to do a full video on the whole island mu run down on thread Ripper if you haven't already seen that if you're not already subscribed you should totally go subscribe to our Linux Channel that's been a really quick look at the MSI gaming Pro carbon AC on the X 399 thread Ripper platform this thing is beastly don't let gaming in the title for you it's all business this is a really exciting platform from AMD and this is a really exciting board from MSI we're also going to a full tour of the UEFI right after the credits bump so if you want to see all the screens the UEFI and all the options well there you go you got it I'm Wendell I'm signing out and I'll see you later you\n"