Styling is, in a sense, played safe by MSI. And that's a good thing. The board's largely black and silver aesthetic leans on a comprehensive set of individually controllable RGB LED lighting zones to give an explosion of colour built to a user's preference. Additional appearance boosts come in the form of Steel Armor PCIe and DDR4 slots, both of which also serve a rigidity-enhancing function. The Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon's feature list should tick the box for most gaming enthusiasts. There's support for 2-card SLI and 3-card CrossFire, dual M.2 PCIe NVMe or SATA SSDs, and 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 is present in both Type-A and Type-C form. MSI has an additional trick which is the board's ability to RAID together a trio of PCIe storage devices (two through M.2 and one through the PCIe slot, for example) in order to enhance transfer rates. That's without stealing CPU-fed PCIe lanes from the GPUs. A Realtek ALC1220-based audio system, Intel NIC, and plenty of fan headers are further parts of the package. Retailing for around £167.99, the MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon has it sights firmly set on mid-range gamers who want added flare from their feature-filled motherboard. |
