Performance
For performance testing, I ran the Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon through our normal benchmarks to confirm that there weren’t any weird performance issues. With the CPU, Memory, and GPU all being the same the results should be just about the same with the exception of when boards do stock overclocking. In this case, even with XMP on there wasn’t an issue with this with the Carbon. So the numbers in all of the tests are right in line with the Asus ROG Stix board that I covered at the launch. The same goes for the network speed results as both boards are running the same Intel I219-V controller.
Normally this would be the end of my testing but I actually had an issue with this board even before the rest of my testing. I had originally planned on doing the Coffee Lake testing on this board but I had issues with the 8700K overheating when doing temperature testing. This is actually why this coverage is only now getting published. After working with MSI they did replicate the issue and found a fix for it. So similar to the other overclocking issues during the initial Coffee Lake launch that caused a lot of drama, the Z370 Carbon did do things a little differently with their settings than the other board I tested. Specifically, the setting called CPU Lite Load under overclocking settings in the BIOS is set to Auto by default but when put under the synthetic load from AIDA64’s FPU test it causes the voltage to bump up to 1.36v. They did this for better memory compatibility but the extra heat it caused was too much for our Noctua NH-U12S. Turning this setting from Auto to Mode 12 drops the voltage down to 1.248v and fixed my temperature settings.
CPU temperature testing isn’t something I normally do on motherboard reviews so this does make me wonder if I have missed issues like this in the past. This also shouldn’t be an issue under normal usage so it may never come up, but if things are running a little warm it might be a setting to check out.
3DMark |
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Motherboard |
Overall Score |
Graphics Score |
Physics Score |
|
Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming |
20338 |
23799 |
19461 |
|
MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon |
20285 |
23679 |
19395 |
|
PCMark 10 Score |
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|
Overall Score |
Essentials |
Productivity |
Content Creation |
Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming |
6850 |
9658 |
9367 |
9644 |
MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon |
6853 |
9672 |
9408 |
9597 |
Passmark PerformanceTest 9.0 Overall Score |
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Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming |
6126.2 |
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MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon |
6247.2 |
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Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands Average FPS |
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Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming |
115.22 |
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MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon |
115.89 |
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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Average FPS |
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Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming |
95.9 |
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MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon |
96.2 |
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Average Network Speed |
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Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming - Intel I219V |
941.1 |
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MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon – Intel I219V |
937.5 |