Performance

When it comes to performance testing, typically motherboard to motherboard we aren’t going to see any big performance difference when running the same components and clock speeds. The exception to that is when boards are auto overclocking of course and there are a few areas where components can make a difference like with ethernet and USB controllers. For our Z790 testing, we don’t have any point of comparison so far to put the MSI MPG Z790 Edge WiFi DDR4 up against currently as we didn’t have a Z790 board for the CPU launch. I’ve paired the board up with the 13900K and Nvidia’s RTX 4090 Founders Edition for a top-end PC setup and ran it through a few tests just as a point of reference on what you could expect performance-wise. We will have to wait until we have other boards to compare it against to see if the Edge stands out in any of them but it was in line with what I expected. I did test with the CPU set to the standard PL1 and PL2 of 253 watts, not the uncapped wattage settings and I had XMP turned on for the memory beyond that the settings were out of the box.

The one area where motherboard testing does sometimes vary would be in the network testing and the MSI MPG Z790 Edge WiFi DDR4 did well in all three of those tests. The Intel 2.5GbE NIC is standard these days but most people still have a 1GbE network so I do include that as well. You can see there is some headroom on each, they don’t run right up on the max capable speed because this is an average. As for the wireless I tested on 6Ghz with Wifi 6E and the MSI MPG Z790 Edge WiFi DDR4 did well. While I don’t like the size/shape of the antenna MSIs design does work well compared to the competition.

When testing I did get the MSI MPG Z790 Edge WiFi DDR4 warmed up by running an AIDA64 FPU CPU workload to warm up the 16 Renesas ISL99390 power stages. After doing that for 20+ minutes I have a few thermal images to check out how the VRM cooling is handling things. Overall they weren’t too bad, up near the VRMs was 58c but there was a hot spot in the section where the CPU socket and the VRMs are the closest where it was running at 66.7c. The heatsink was transferring some heat up and was warmed up to 44.5c The heatsink on the top of the board is running warmer even with it having more open airflow around it.

While lighting doesn’t affect performance at all when doing my testing I did get a few pictures of the lighting on the Z790 Edge WiFi DDR4. The board just has one area with lighting on the cover over the rear I/O. It has the MIS Gaming dragon logo and by default, it rotates through the color spectrum but you can control it using the Mystic Light RGB software if you want to tie it in with other lighting on your board like in our setup the RGB on the memory.