Overall and Final Verdict
Years ago, when I took a look at one of the first generation MSI Carbon motherboards, the Carbon lineup used fake carbon fiber styling and took the whole “gamer” styling up even more which is what some people dig but was too over the top for me (real carbon fiber weave would still be cool though). The Cabron lineup has changed a lot from those days, the styling for the X870E Carbon Wifi is good. I love the blacked-out look and the mix of a few different greys on the M.2 heatsink logo looks good. The only thing I’m not really feeling is the MSI Gaming dragon logo being huge on the rear. Without a doubt though, I was most impressed with the M.2 heatsink and drive installation experience. Both M.2 heatsinks hook into one end and have a nice solid metal mechanism that you push on and they pop right off. On top of that the M.2 mounting itself also has the same setup with a metal button that latches the drive in place and pushing it unlatches the drive. It feels premium, like a board like this should.
The X870E Carbon Wifi impressed with its wireless performance, not only do the wireless NICs that support 320 MHz bands perform faster, even on our Wifi 6E network, but the X870E Carbon Wifi managed to edge out a little more performance compared to the Asus board with a similar NIC which is most likely from the antenna. The X870E Carbon Wifi is loaded up with good VRMs and the cooling was solid there as well as with the M.2 drives. I also was happy with the USB configuration, you get enough connections to handle everything you will throw at it including three Type-C with two of those being new USB 4 ports with their 40Gbps speeds. I did run into a few areas that I think could still be improved on. The PCIe and M.2 configuration has two of the three PCIe slots and one M.2 slot all sharing PCI lanes meaning if you use the second PCIe slot or the second M.2 slot your main PCIe slot for your video card will drop down to x8 lanes. I know they wanted to pack as much into the board as possible but I would prefer a few fewer slots to not have to worry about potentially slowing down the most used slot on the board. The fan profile configuration in the BIOS has 4 adjustment points, I would like to see a little more there to make it easier to fine-tune your fan profiles. The last thing was just a note on the 5G NIC. It performed flawlessly. My issue is just with 5G NICs in general. If you are taking advantage of a 5Gb NIC, you most likely already have a 10GbE network. Because of that, I would prefer them to save the money for the 5G NIC and go with a second 2.5G or go all out with a 10G NIC.
No doubt about it though, the issues I had were small compared to the positives on the X870E Carbon Wifi. MSI did a great job with the board. But what will it run you? Well, you are going to have to throw down $499.99 for the X870E Carbon Wifi. That puts it right up with the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi that I already took a look at and the Aorus Master as well. Base feature wise all three boards have a similar setup. The Aorus board has the same PCIe layout and the X870E-E has one less PCIe slot but has one more M.2 slot. All three have the shared lanes issue and the same 5G NIC. The Aorus board has fewer Type-C connections and the Asus board has one more. The Asus board has one more VRM with an 18+2+2 to the 18+2+1 on the Carbon and the Aorus has fewer with its 16+2+2. I would put the Asus board slightly ahead on features and the Aorus behind but the X870E Carbon Wifi does have a $10 rebate currently and it will just depend on what features you prioritize.
Live Pricing: HERE
