The MSI MPG X570S Carbon Max WiFi motherboard is the silent update from the X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi motherboard, but with a few improvements here and there, is it worth a look?

When AMD first launched the Ryzen 3000 series, the company launched the X570 chip as usual to provide the chip and more advanced features for its new processors. And because that chip – at the time – was ahead of what the company itself and competitor Intel offered at the same time, many believed that it was premature in terms of its own technologies compared to the market. Perhaps this is what prompted the company to abandon the idea of ​​significantly updating the chip with the release of the next JJ of Ryzen 5000 processors, which attacked the market just one year after the Ryzen 3000 processors.

Although the company did not release any new chips after that, such as the X670 chip, for example, the company has instead updated the same old chip, the X570 a little, in order to get rid of its stock of chips in preparation for the new generation of processors and chips, which will replace many of the standards used Such as DDR4 and PCIe 4.0 and later versions. The modernization of the chipset was in the form of eliminating traditional chip cooling and converting it to passive (ie fanless) cooling.

MSI is one of the first companies to adopt the idea of ​​bringing X570S motherboards to market, as it has four X570S motherboards out of a total of 13 X570 motherboards. The motherboard we have today is the MSI MPG X570S Carbon Max WiFi motherboard, which comes in at £290. As we mentioned at the beginning, this type of board that comes with the X570 Ben chip offers you something new in terms of the technical specifications of the chip, but it does not use fans in the cooling process of the chip, so we don’t think you may be surprised when you see that the board in our hands is very similar to the board The motherboard X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi, as they are in fact the same motherboard, but MSI has changed the aesthetics of the board and a number of key features in this new version.

So, without any more unhelpful elaboration, let’s jump right in and see what the board does in terms of ports and overall performance, and then call it our rating.

A look at the MSI MPG X570S Carbon Max WiFi motherboard

Motherboard design

In general, due to the presence of covers on the heatsinks, the overall design of the board is very clean as MSI grouped the fan heads and switches on the edges of the motherboard, while the main parts remain largely covered, giving the aesthetics and the most outstanding performance. This is in addition to the gray color mixed with black, which adds more aesthetics to the shape of the panel.

As we pointed out a while ago, the new board we’re looking at today is essentially an update to the X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi. Among these improvements are greater coverage of the heatsinks, the disappearance of the fan on the chipset, and the addition of RGB lighting across two sections. To begin with, the LEDs below the board’s Carbon name on the heatsink above the south bridge can be clearly seen, which actually isn’t the best. In contrast, MSI has done a much better job with the 3-strip lighting above the heatsink of the main VRMs, where the LEDs are hidden away.

Cooling and power phases

And speaking of heatsinks, when you remove the M.2’s protective shield “which in its natural state gives a very elegant look and feel,” the board will reveal one of its strengths: its ample SSD storage solutions. The top slot operates through the PCIe threads provided by the CPU, providing full PCIe 4.0 x4 speed coverage, while the bottom triple emanates from the chipset’s PCIe threads. All of these sockets also have thermal pads between the heatsink and the storage unit itself.

Moving on to the power phases, we will find that the power that the board provides to the Ryzen processor chip is more than enough. MSI uses seven phases that are effectively multiplied, so that the 7-phase voltage regulator is actually 14 phases (75 amps of power). This range is cooled by some of the most serious coverage heatsinks on the market. On top of that, the nature of the heatsinks surrounding the PCIe x16 slot have a knock-on effect by making removing the card more difficult than it’s normally supposed to be, but this is a common problem with similar motherboards (which have a lot of protection, and heat shields). ).

Another thing we didn’t like was the iconic LED indicator that’s so high up in the far right that it can be easily obscured by the top-mounted radiators in the relatively narrow computer cases. And since we’re still in this area of ​​the motherboard, we have to note that MSI has done a good job hardening the DIMM slots, for the sake of aesthetics more than anything else, because a £300 board is worth every bit. That kind of tenderness, of course.

USB ports and audio solution

Another thing that makes you feel out of touch with this board is the 5Gbps USB connectors, which are pretty far at the bottom of the board. The Type-C connector, located below the 24-pin ATX connections, is limited to just 10Gbps, as is the case in general. In any case, the lighting for the board is dim and good in terms of performance, and if you don’t want it at all, a simple switch stops it easily.

Moving to another point in the evaluation, it’s worth noting that the ALC4080 audio codec may sound great on paper in terms of specs, but it has the same audio credentials as the popular ALC1220 driver found on many competing motherboards.

The board comes with eight SATA ports, which is a good thing but we don’t know it may seem superfluous nowadays, with so many M.2 slots and the category this board is destined for, four would have been enough. Especially since up to four of those on board may become unusable if you stuff an M.2_3 slot with a relatively long PCIe SSD storage.

Ports on the rear I/O board

There is no doubt that HDMI connections are useful for the latest Ryzens devices that support integrated graphics solutions. The board on top comes with two red USB Type-A ports and one Type-C port all providing a maximum speed of 10Gbps. While the quad blue band provides a speed of 5 Gbps. And here the important question arises, why did the company not add any ports at a speed of 20 Gbps, do such ports seem exaggerated with a panel of this type or category? we do not think so.

However, MSI preferred Realtek to provide a 2.5G LAN solution, which we believe has become a must-have for any enthusiast motherboard. MSI also offers its own Click BIOS 5 switching technology which you will find on the back panel from the top as well. In addition, while also staying within the connectivity solutions, the company is providing the motherboard with part of its name, as the motherboard handles wireless connectivity through the distinctive Intel AX210 WiFi 6E chip, along with integrated Bluetooth 5.2 technology.

Performance results

This time around, we’re testing the motherboard’s performance with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor paired with the RTX 3080 Ti when we run our own tests. Running games and heavy programs was not a scary thing for this panel, as it is concerned with build quality and temperatures, as well as with aesthetics and features. This time though, we won’t go into the performance aspect of apps and software because there’s nothing new in this regard. But we will talk about the temperatures, the performance of the storage units, and other features that the company provides as a kind of update.

Of course, the panels don’t change anything in your gaming experience. Games work as they should work on the processor and card without caring about the specifications of the motherboard itself. What we are interested in in choosing is the features that this board offers and its ability to overclock the processor to reach good numbers that can extract the power of the current graphics cards. And since we’re with the X570S chip, let’s see what we can get with the PCIe 4.0 interface here!

PCIe performance and motherboard and chipset temperatures

With four PCIe 4.0 storage ports, we’ll be testing the speed of the storage with just one storage. We start the test with the PCIe 4.0 interface that we tested the XPG Gammix S50 unit. This is in order to see what temperatures the unit can reach, as the speeds of the storage units are the same as those provided by the traditional X570 boards and there is no difference here in speed, as the unit achieved speeds of 4958 for reading and 4271 for writing.

When we installed this unit without the heat sink included with the panel, we found that it averaged an average of 39°C and reached 45° when pressured heavily. Which makes us completely reassured about this aspect.

As for the thermal performance of the motherboard, the board has achieved very good results. Perhaps the main reason is the large heat sinks found almost everywhere. In the normal mode, the board achieved a system temperature of 35 degrees Celsius and the temperature of the chip itself reached only about 40 degrees, as for the voltage-regulator units it stabilized at 37, while the processor was stuck at a temperature of 44 degrees. They are very excellent grades with this kind of silent cooling.

Audio chip performance

The audio chip provided by the company offers good quality, and we can say that it is very good for an integrated audio chip that supports the MSI Audio Boost 5 audio system, which gives the user a wide range of technologies. Starting with the ALC4080 audio processor that takes you up from the HD-A interface to USB, it offers double the DAC format from 32bit/192kHz to 32bit/384kHz, delivering the highest quality sound. It also has a dedicated amplifier that enables custom headphones to operate with up to 600-degree impedance, delivering studio-level sound from your gaming PC.

This is to design the isolated audio system, which is similar to a discrete sound card, in which the audio components and circuits are housed in a dedicated section of the motherboard and electrically isolated. It provides separate audio layers for the left and right channels for pure and even sound quality.

Excellent software support

In fact, MSI hasn’t offered any BIOS updates recently. We also don’t find any innovation in their MSI Center software for controlling lights etc, but it’s still great and easy to use. You do not need any update at the moment, unless the company has another opinion about the designs placed in these systems, which are easy to use as we mentioned.

The process of controlling the RGB lighting was easy in general with the driver software MSI Center. The sync process never stopped while the device was running and testing. The process of selecting the effects and its speed was smooth and fast and did not take any time, and the process of controlling the lighting and controlling the device was very clear and easy, and there is no need to explain it, it is self-explanatory.

The same can be said for the BIOS of the board, which as seen in the picture was very easy to work with. All the basic settings were easy to access clearly and explicitly, overclocking the memory and monitoring the performance of the parts in the board didn’t see any problems from our point of view and we didn’t need to look into any manual in order to deal with the board, which is what you can expect from a company like MSI.

Evaluation and final judgment

As we always say over and over, motherboards, although they are the main factor in everything you see in front of you in your computer in terms of performance or modern technologies, they are sometimes overestimated. And here we are by no means referring to users, but to the manufacturers themselves. So, what is the need to include many features, connections and sockets everywhere in the motherboard when most users – with the exception of a very small group of them – may not use all these features at all! On the other hand, companies may neglect the minute details that would have added a lot to motherboards.

This unfortunately applies to the painting that we have today. Anyone looking at the MSI MPG X570S Carbon Max WiFi motherboard will know right away that it is one of the X570S motherboards that everyone knows won’t do much in terms of the chip itself apart from its cooling. Which leaves you mostly with the specifications of the chip itself.

And to be fair, the board offered a lot in terms of the features it provides and in terms of design as well. The board offers a very distinctive design that reflects a sense of safety and elegance thanks to the simple RGB lighting and heat sinks throughout, which provide better cooling of components, while providing a clean appearance of the board at the same time. In terms of support, there is nothing wrong with it, four M.2 ports and eight SATA ports (which we did not like by the way) in addition to many expansion ports and USB ports of various types, which unfortunately lost speeds of 20Gbps unnecessarily.

As for the performance itself, as we mentioned earlier, it all depends in the end on what the board can provide in terms of speeds and frequencies for the central processor, which usually goes back to the power phases (which the board is easily characterized by), storage units and graphics cards. It provides all of that adequately, as we saw in the performance section. It also does all this while keeping temperatures within very good limits compared to solutions in its class or even higher in its price category.

Finally, in terms of price, unfortunately this point was one of the things that we did not like at all, we are talking about a returned or duplicated motherboard in everything. The chip for the X570S does not offer anything new, nor does the motherboard itself compare to its older sister MSI MPG X570S Carbon Max WiFi, even if it offers some advantages in terms of sockets and expansion slots that sometimes lacked the best (as in the case of USB speeds), or exceeded Reasonable limit (as in the case of SATA connections).

To make it the perfect motherboard if you are new to the world of AMD, nothing more. We can’t recommend this motherboard here if you are going to upgrade, for example, as the X570S chip is a duplicate of the original X570 chip with a slight difference, and the board itself is a duplicate of the X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi board. So, we can simply say that we are in front of the silent update of the X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi motherboard, or in another way, a repetition of what was essentially redundant!

MSI MPG X570S Carbon Max WiFi Motherboard Review

• Performance: 8.5
• Design: 9
• Cooling: 8.5
• Price: 7
• Accessories: 7

Positives

• Very good and stable performance.
• Lower temperatures and noise levels thanks to the silent chip.
• Easy software support.
• Multiple expansion ports and various USB support.
• Four M.2 ports, providing incredible capacity and speeds for content creators.
• Distinctive and elegant design with harmony in colors and distribution of components.

Negatives

• The price is high.
• The motherboard doesn’t offer as many updates as a new product with the X570S chip.
• The board lacks 20Gbps USB ports