MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon Test Setup
We tested the MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 1700X processor. It’s an 8-core, 16-thread processor and sits right in between the 1800x and 1700. BIOS version used is version 7A32v14. The full specifications of the system I used are listed below.
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64bit
Motherboard: MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon
Processor: AMD Ryzen 1700X
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4
Memory: Geil EVO-X DDR4-3200MHz CL 16
Graphics card: Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini
Storage Drives: Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB NVMe SSD
Power Supply: Seasonic 1050W Platinum
Chassis: DimasTech Bench Table Easy V3.0
Please note that a motherboard’s performance is as good as the other components you install on it. Don’t expect that an X370 motherboard like this will make your system perform (way) faster compared to other X370 motherboards (or even B350) with the same components installed. Overclocking results vary and it usually depends on the quality of the CPU, GPU or RAM that you get.
MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon Overclocking
Overclocking with the MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon was easy and very much straight forward. I only adjusted the core frequency to 3.9GHz, increased the CPU voltage and set the A-XMP to 3200MHz (the default XMP speed of the Geil EVO-X DDR4 memory). I wasn’t able to push our 1700X any further than 3.9GHz, even when installed on other X370 motherboards (from Asus and Gigabyte). I checked other 1700X reviews and most are stuck at 3.9GHz, very few reached 4GHz stable. You can see from the CPU-Z screenshot above that the 1700X is running at 3.9GHZ all cores.
Note that not all memory will run at their expected “XMP” speeds. Some may not be compatible so you’ll need to check the motherboard’s memory support list. For example, my GALAX DDR4 HOF with a speed of 3600MHz was running perfectly with my Gigabyte Z170 Gaming 7 + i7-6700K system without any problem. But when I tried it on any of the X370 motherboards we have here, it only runs up to 2933MHz.
Also, like I said in the previous page (BIOS section), the tweaking options are simple. No crazy tweaking controls or LN2 overclocking support. I don’t think extreme overclockers will use a motherboard like this, so I don’t think it’s really necessary to have those kinds of features present in this motherboard.
Continue on the next page for the benchmark results we got with the MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard.
