MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC: MSI Takes On The Sub 200 Dollar Z390 Market

For the test platform, we have the 9900K on the three initial Z390 motherboard models with Corsair Vengeance running at 3200MHz CL 15 for the Intel side. We are running a Thermaltake AIO Triple Radiator cooling solution on the CPU to make sure we don’t get any throttling on the CPU. The operating system is Windows 10 Pro X64 with updates disabled. We make three runs at each test then average those three runs and report the results here. If we hit a run that we consider being far away from the norm we dismiss that result and run a 4th test.

One thing worth noting is most board results will be within the margin for error so performance is shown just to show it falls in line with the rest or even shows when a board may be a strong outlier.

In regards to the Gigabyte motherboards, they do not actually follow the Intel guidelines for ICCmax so this means longer turbo duration rather than observing the power target. Also the binning down of the Ring of -3 for the Gigabyte board means that in most cases the RING ratio is 47 versus the default 43 of the other tested boards.

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