Performance

For testing, I have been saying for years that motherboard benchmarks don’t hold much weight because you are still using the same CPU, memory, and GPU and those are what play big roles in how fast your PC is. But I do run a few tests just to make sure everything is running the way it should and it also lets us see what the system can do. In this case, it is the i9-10900K and an RTX 2080 which is a potent combination. Until I test more boards however the results don’t say much, but I can say having seen into the future with those other boards that the MSI MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi does run right with the other boards tested. I also test network performance and this is the one area that you sometimes see a difference. Sadly I wasn’t able to get a new switch in before the launch to put the 2.5G network to the test, but I was still curious if the 2.5G NIC would see any slowdowns on a Gigabit network which is what most people will be using it on. With the wired test showing 950.9 Mbits per second I think we can say for sure that it doesn’t. The WiFi 6 results were okay but not as fast as I was able to see on other WiFi 6 devices like in my WiFi 6 test.

I also tested out thermals with our thermal camera. I wanted to see if there were any hot spots on the board which there wasn’t other than at the VRMs like expected. The hot spot under the GPU ended up not being that warm as well. As for the VRM cooling, the hottest spot in between the VRMs and the CPU after running the AIDA64 FPU stress test was at 159 while the heatsinks were running cooler at 131.

I also took a look at the built-in lighting. The MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi has lighting on the rear I/O cover and then around the chipset cooler, it has an underglow effect. By default, it rolls through colors and it isn’t too much or too little and just enough lighting to tie into your theme even before you add any other case or fan lighting. Having the Corsair integration was also nice given how popular their RGB lighting/fans are.