I’m starting to fancy a Ryzen setup for my multi-threaded computational needs. Not the 1800X, 1700X or 1700 … but rather, a Ryzen 5 -1600X or 1600. The MSI’s X370 range of motherboards do look nice.
MSI now has three “X370 Gaming Pro” motherboards. The first one is the X370 Gaming Pro Carbon, which the company launched its socket AM4 lineup with, then the X370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC, released earlier this month, which is its variant with 802.11ac WLAN; and now we have the X370 Gaming Pro (without the “Carbon” moniker). This board is based on a different PCB, and has a lighter feature-set than the X370 Gaming Pro Carbon series. The board features the same 10-phase CPU VRM as the Pro Carbon boards. The expansion slot layout is identical, too, with two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x8/x8 with both populated) wired to the CPU, a third x16 (electrical x4) slot wired to the X370 chipset, and three other x1 slots.
The differences kick in with the storage options. You get six SATA 6 Gb/s ports, but just one 32 Gb/s M.2 slot with MSI M.2 Shield (the Pro Carbon boards have two M.2 slots). Another major difference is the lighting. The chipset heatsink, audio ground-layer isolation strip, and various other areas on the board have red LED illumination, in place of RGB LED on the Pro Carbon boards. You can still control the brightness and illumination of these red LEDs using the Mystic Light Sync software. Another area of cost-cutting is the gigabit Ethernet. This board features a Realtek RTL8111H controller, while the Pro Carbon boards feature Intel I211AT controllers. The rest of the board’s feature set is the same as the Pro Carbon, including two USB 3.1 ports (with one typc-C port), VR Boost USB ports. The MSI X370 Gaming Pro goes on sale on the 11th of April, at a price we expect to be around USD $150.
Source: Techpowerup
