MSI MPG Z590 Carbon EK X, Watercool Your Rocket

The MPG Board Sports An EKWB Monoblock

MSI’s MPG Z590 Carbon EK X looks to be a good choice for overclockers, a 16-phase Vcore VRM on a 6-layer PCB with both the CPU and VRMs cooled by an EKWB waterblock and comes with a leak tester kit. It is also quite versatile, with 2.5 Gb/s LAN and WiFi 6E connectivity, as well as three M.2 slots which all have heatsinks.  The Carboc EK X also comes with another brilliant feature, a physical RGB LED off switch!

As Rocket Lake does not launch until Tuesday, TechPowerUp used Intel’s Core i9-10900K to test the board, cooled by Swiftech’s Apogee SKF LT block, a Bitspower SC6 pump, and 360 mm radiator.  That was still not enough to tame Intel’s beast, they started to see thermal throttling at an overclock of 5.2 GHz at 1.38 V.  This means a more powerful cooling loop could net you more performance as the chip still seemed to have headroom left over. The VRMs on the other hand stayed very cool, topping their charts with a peak temperature of 37C during the VRM torture test.

TPU also spent a bit of time testing the new Realtek ALC4080 audio codec, as it is new to the market.  Read about that and more in the full review.