MSI MEG Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi Motherboard Review - A premium board with a solid feature set

TweakTown's Rating: 88%

The Bottom Line

MSI's Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi offers a comprehensive feature set that you'll have to pay a lot more to top.

Pros

• Five M.2 slots
• Dual LAN
• 320MHz Wi-Fi 7
• Tons of USB
• Three PCIe x16 expansion slots

Cons

• Aging audio codec
• Can get a bit warm

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

MSI's MPG Carbon motherboards have traditionally been considered mid-range offerings, but that isn't really the case anymore. A $500 motherboard used to be a flagship-tier price, but with the Godlikes and Aces in this inflationary world, you must pay more than before if you want something truly high-end.

If you're prepared to pay, the MSI MPG Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi delivers a long list of features and a premium aesthetic that won't be out of place in a system packed with memory, storage, and a high-end GPU. In fact, if you are saving up for a new RTX 5090 and looking for a capable Z890 board, a couple of hundred saved over the really expensive motherboards could make the difference.

The Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi is a standard ATX board. Its highlights include support for five M.2 SSDs, 320MHz Wi-Fi 7, 5G LAN, a powerful VRM, three physical PCIe x16 slots, and loads of fast USB ports. It'll easily sit at the heart of a Core Ultra 9 285K system.

Like all Z890 motherboards, the MPG Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi brings many ease-of-use improvements and introduces high-speed CUDIMM support. Arrow Lake may not have set the world ablaze with stunning gaming performance, but a high-end Arrow Lake system is undoubtedly appealing in many use cases, particularly if you can leverage its strong multi-threaded performance.

The MPG Z890 Carbon WFI is priced at $499. That's a lot for a motherboard, but it's not in crazy territory.

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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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The box containing the Z890 Carbon shouts Intel Inside! And, just in case you're tempted to eat a CR2032 battery, there's a warning not to do so. Seriously, if it stops even one child from inadvertently swallowing one, it's worth having it there.

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Like all motherboards these days, the rear of the box provides a complete list of the board's key features and specifications. It's a comprehensive list!

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The bundled accessory complement is impressive. You get a well-made Wi-Fi Antenna, a USB drive with a set of drivers and utilities, and a clever cable that connects to a dedicated 7-pin header on the motherboard. The cable integrates fan, ARGB, and USB 2.0 headers into one, which will be useful for those interested in neat builds. It can also be used with AIO coolers that require USB signal communication.

The other accessories include two SATA cables, a front case header cable, an ARGB extension cable, and a 1 to 2 RGB extension cable. These are joined by some M.2 bits and pieces, an MSI flyer, stickers, a quick installation guide, and regulatory notices.

Motherboard Overview

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The Z890 Carbon is a good-looking board. Gone are the days of garish, over-the-top designs. The heatsinks feature mostly gray highlights, while there's the common RGB MSI dragon atop the rear I/O area. The word 'Carbon' is also lit. It's cleverly done, too, as it's atop the detachable primary SSD heatsink. It retains its simple quick-release mechanism without an auxiliary wire.

Like most modern motherboards, you get three ARGB headers plus a header for an additional RGB strip.

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The Z890 Carbon has a decent, if unremarkable, set of internal I/O. Seven fan headers are placed around the board, making it a good option for those looking to build a water-cooled system. A water flow sensor and thermistor headers will be useful in that case.

The board includes an auxiliary 8-pin PCIe power connector for multi-GPU setups and a debug LED display. However, it doesn't have power or reset buttons, which would be nice for a board in this price range. It also lacks things like slow mode or safe mode buttons. You can program the Smart Button on the rear of the board to choose the latter, but MSI is clearly positioning the Carbon at gamers and power users rather than overclockers. That's what the Unify series is for.

The USB header complement comprises a single Type-C USB 20Gbps, four 5Gbps, and four USB 2.0 ports. The 20Gbps port supports 27W fast charging.

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Four DIMM slots support speeds of DDR5-9200+, with up to 256GB supported. That is right on what can be expected from a four-slot board. With a capable memory controller and CUDIMM kit, you may be able to reach higher speeds. If you want to push a memory kit towards that difficult DDR5-10000 barrier, a dual DIMM board like MSI's MEG Z890 Unify-X is better suited to maximize memory speeds.

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The Z890 Carbon features a very capable VRM. It is a 20+1+1+1 (VCCCore, VCCSA, VCCGT, and VNNAON) phase design. That's more than enough to power a heavily overclocked Core Ultra 9 285K and have plenty in reserve, even pushed hard. If nothing else, Arrow Lake is not as demanding as its Raptor Lake predecessors.

With a strong VRM comes the need for capable heatsinks to tame it. Interestingly, despite their bulk and surface area, the Z890 Carbon returned the highest VRM temperatures we've seen on any Z890 board to date. A peak of 64 degrees is well under the level where temperatures become a concern, though.

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The Z890 Carbon has five PCB-mounted M.2 slots. The primary M.2 slot supports PCIe 5.0 drives and is connected to the CPU. The rest of the slots support PCIe 4.0 drives. It might be nice to have support for a second PCIe 5.0 drive, but unless you're constantly shuffling terabytes of data around, PCIe 4.0 drives are far from obsolete.

Four SATA ports join the five M.2 slots.

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As is typical, the primary slot has a dedicated cooling block with a well-designed retention mechanism. A separate plate cools the other four slots.

Having all four slots populated underneath a graphics card will be challenging for cooling. I recommend using the bottom pair of slots before the middle pair. That way, they'll get more direct airflow over them.

The MEG Z890 Ace includes three PCIe x16 slots. The topmost slot supports PCIe 5.0 and runs at x16. The second slot also supports PCIe 5.0, while the third slot is connected to the chipset and supports PCIe 4.0 x4.

The second pair of slots are well positioned and can still be used with a four-slot graphics card. MSI did a good job overall with the slot layout and lane sharing.

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The Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi's rear I/O panel is really impressive. Even if MSI wanted to, there's little room to include anything else.

The top-notch USB complement includes dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports with DP support. Another Type-C 10 Gbps port and 10 Type-A 10Gbps ports join them. You can install a keyboard, mouse, headphones, external HDD, and printer, and you'll still have more than half the ports to spare.

It's nice to see a single HDMI 2.1 port included, which can support triple monitors if used in conjunction with the Thunderbolt 4 ports. Most buyers of a high-end motherboard will have a discrete GPU, but it's better to have the option than not.

MSI went with Intel-only networking controllers. Killer E5000B 5G and I226V 2.5G controllers give excellent flexibility. I'd like to see a single 10G LAN instead of dual ports, but that's one of the few things that makers use to differentiate boards that cost a lot more than Carbon's $499 price.

An Intel BE1750X controller performs Wi-Fi 7 duties. This controller supports 320MHz connections and offers up to 5.8Gbps of bandwidth.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC1220 codec drives these. It's an aging controller. It's capable enough for most users, but there are alternatives in this price range with superior audio solutions.

Finally, we come to the bank of three buttons in the middle. These include a CMOS clear button and a BIOS flashback button. MSI calls the third button the Smart Button. It can be programmed via the BIOS to do useful things like toggle the RGB on or off, reset the system in safe mode, or set the speed of all fans to full speed.

UEFI and Test System

UEFI

Firstly, I confess to misplacing the UEFI screenshots I took from the Z890 Carbon, and I no longer have access to the board. Hence, they are not included here, as they usually would be.

The MSI MPG Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi incorporates the company's redesigned Click BIOS X UEFI interface, which is a major change from MSI's previous UEFI designs.

Upon entering the BIOS, you'll be in the default EZ mode, which features all the basic set-and-forget settings you might need. Fundamental settings such as enabling XMP, auto overclocking, power profiles, and boot device priorities can be found here.

The Advanced Mode is where the real magic happens. You'll find all the key settings related to overclocking the CPU and memory there. The sub-pages can be selected by moving the mouse to the left side of the page.

Overall, the color scheme and fonts are a big step from the aging design that debuted in the Z68 days. I'll take simplicity and ease of use over brighter colors and graphics any day of the week.

Test System

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to showcase their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of a tested CPU.

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Cinebench shows the Core Ultra 9 285K at its best. The Z890 Carbon returned a result well within an acceptable margin-of-error range for a 285K.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU like a Core Ultra 9 285K. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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The motherboard makes little difference in our Blender test; the Z890 Carbon's result of 398 seconds is just two seconds slower than the best result. That's nothing in percentage terms for a test that takes over six and a half minutes to complete.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

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The 285K is an excellent chip for rendering and encoding; we see it again here. The Z890 Carbon is a little behind in the low 181FPS range.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's influenced by memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A result of 188.54 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark puts the Z890 Carbon slightly behind the ASUS boards, but in relative terms, the differences are not significant.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs; however, Arrow Lake is far less impressive in that regard. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but more significant margins, mainly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.

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The 285K's memory latency performance is a weak point of the new architecture, but a decent DDR5-7200 kit, such as the G.Skill one we used for testing, shaves a good 10ns off of what you'd expect from a DDR5-6000 kit. A result of 83.6 nanoseconds isn't outstanding for the Z890 Carbon, but margin-of-error results in tests measured in nanoseconds are not uncommon.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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Few people will buy a board in this class for office use, and the differences between the boards are insignificant. This test can also vary if run several times. Still, the Z890 Carbon trails the pack here, and not for the last time.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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This is a better result for the Z890 Carbon, even if the difference between boards is relatively small.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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The tested boards all deliver essentially identical results in this GPU-limited game.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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Here's another gaming result that shows the motherboards are all within a small percentage of one another, at least in terms of average FPS. The Z890 Carbon comes in with an expected set of results.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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Metro Exodus and the other gaming results show that the motherboard usually makes little difference in gaming performance when all other components and settings are equal. But, the Z890 Carbon falls behind by a whisker again.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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As we mentioned in the motherboard overview, the Z890 Carbon produces VRM temperatures a little higher than we'd expect, given its high heatsink surface area. It looks worse than it really is, though. A result of 64 degrees would be absolutely stellar compared to some cheap Z890 boards. It's not a concern for modern VRM designs.

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The Z890 Carbon's primary SSD heatsink doesn't have the high surface area of some competing designs, and that's reflected in the higher peak SSD temperature results. Sixty-three degrees isn't bad, and most PCIe 5.0 SSD tasks are more bursty in nature than the long 3DMark test. As long as you have good case airflow, it's nothing to worry about.

Final Thoughts

The MSI MEG Z890 Carbon is among the more feature-rich Z890 of the seven Z890 boards we've reviewed to date. It aims to hit a high level of features and specifications but at a price far below the true flagship options.

It all comes down to what you'll gain if you spend more. A board-mounted display, 10G LAN, or a PCIe add-in card might be desirable for many, but you'll have to spend a lot more. If you're looking at a brand spanking new RTX 5090 or RTX 5080, you can save a couple of hundred towards that, and that's where you'll see actual performance gains.

Of course, the same argument can be applied to the Z890 Carbon. Little stops you from buying a cheaper B860 board and getting the full performance out of a high-end card. It's all horses for courses.

The MSI MPG Z890 Carbon has got it where it counts. You get dual LAN including 5G, 320MHz Wi-Fi 7, support for five M.2 SSDs, three x16 expansion slots, a strong VRM easily capable of powering an overclocked 285K, and boatloads of USB expansion potential. Do you need more?

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It's not perfect - no motherboard is. There are no onboard power and reset buttons, and it's missing one or two percent of (mostly insignificant) performance. It could also use a current-generation audio codec. None of these are deal breakers, though.

The MSI MPG Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi is a feature-rich motherboard that includes everything but the kitchen sink. If you value connectivity and expansion support above all else, it justifies its $499 price. Those looking to build a Core Ultra 200 system with a high-end graphics card, excellent networking capabilities, and support for an endless amount of high-speed USB should have a good look at the MSI MPG Z890 Carbon Wi-Fi.