Raptor Lake CPUs are a reality, and with them comes a new generation of motherboards like the MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI.The Intel Z790 chipset is updated to provide them with even greater connectivity, their VRMs increase, as in this case, to 19+1+1 phases, and new designs are created that are more and more elaborate.In this case we have the high-end board at a balanced price par excellence from MSI, with no less than 5 M.2 slots, all of them PCIe 4.0 + 1 5.0, 10 USB ports, 2.5G LAN connectivity + WiFi 6E, ALC sound 4080 and a flawless look thanks to its robust passive cooling blocks.How will it behave with the 13900K?We thank MSI for their trust in us by sending us this board for review.The presentation of this MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI consists of a rigid cardboard box a little thinner than the typical high-end boards, where model information is displayed on the lower area.Inside, as always, we find the plate inside an insulating plastic bag, on a cardboard support that divides the area for accessories.The content barely changes compared to the Z690 version:It is obvious to mention that the MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI changes its aesthetic section as a good new generation motherboard, which has a large coverage of aluminum blocks, with a black base to give it a minimalist look.It presents a lighting area on the rear port cover, as well as 3 headers for RGB strips, 2 of them 5VDG and another 12VRGB.Despite having 5 M.2 slots, the board maintains its standard ATX format, as it also maintains a single chip for the south bridge instead of two like the AMD X670E.In the upper half we find a passive cooling system for the VRM made up of 2 aluminum blocks joined by a copper heatpipe with a cover-shaped extension for the rear port panel to increase the cooling area.Under them we find 7W/mK silicone thermal pads for chokes and MOSFETS.The memory banks do not have external steel reinforcement, but their solders will be recessed into the back of the PCB to eliminate electrical noise on the DDR5 modules.We go to the lower half where we have a novelty such as the Shield Frozr aluminum block for the main M.2 slot.This happens to have a quick coupling system by means of a button and front tabs that avoid the use of screws.Likewise, a Q-Latch anchor for the SSD and an aluminum backplate with a double-sided silicone thermal pad complete the configuration for this PCIe 5.0 slot on the board.The next block will also be dedicated exclusively to the second M.2 slot, which becomes a traditional screw anchor, although the SSD fixer is a tab, just like the rest.For the following 3 slots, the same cooling block has been shared, independent of the chipset block, which also has double-sided silicone thermal pads.The main PCIe 5.0 slot has steel reinforcement at the connection and additionally sunken solders on the PCB just like the DIMMs.This MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI does not include a cover in the rear area, so we continue with a cooling system made up of a header dedicated to the CPU heatsink and another to RL AIO and 5 headers for system fans, all of them PWM with Nuvoton controllers.Likewise, multiple temperature sensors are distributed in key areas such as VRM, Socket or PCIe to monitor temperatures.The VRM of this MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI increases in quantity and power compared to the Z690 version by 19 main phases for Vcore, 1 phase for VccGT and 1 phase for VccAUX.The main feed is via two 8-pin headers complete with outer steel reinforcement and filter coil at the input.So we have a DC-DC Vcore conversion stage with 19 Renesas RAA 22010540 MOSFETS rated at 105A in direct phase configuration without duplicators, adding an MPS2210/MPS87670 MOSFET built by Monolithic Power Systems and another 75A Renesas RAA 220075R0 MOSFET for VccGT and VccAUX.The digital PWM control of the Vcore is handled by a Renesas RAA 229131, which was also present in the Z690 version and other high-end boards.The VRM is completed with a signal smoothing stage made up of 21+1 metal choke coils and high performance solid electrolytic and polymer capacitors.This MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI maintains the LGA1700 socket that increases its compatibility with 10nm Alder Lake and Raptor Lake architectures as well as Intel Pentium and Celeron processors based on the same manufacturing process.Next to it we have the new Intel Z790 chipset that obviously improves the performance of the Z690, supporting overclocking, which maintains only one silicon instead of dividing it into two as AMD does with its X670E.This Z790 has a total of 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes and 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes (12x 4.0 + 16x 3.0 for the Z690), thus being a platform that continues to operate with Gen3, 4 and 5 lanes simultaneously.So in reality the only thing this chipset does is increase the number of 4.0 lanes by decreasing the 3.0, but it maintains a total of 28 plus the 20 that the CPUs have.Its capacity is increased up to 5 USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbps), or 10 USB 3.2 Gen2/1 (10 Gbps), maintaining the 8 SATA 6 Gbps ports and support for Thunderbolt 4 plus network connectivity extras and technologies storage such as Intel Rapid Storage.RAM memory capacity is maintained at DDR5 up to 128 GB with 32 GB modules in its 4 DIMM slots.The difference comes in the maximum speed, which natively Raptor Lake supports 5600 MT/s and this board will support up to 7800 MT/s in 1DPC 1R mode thanks to JEDEC XMP 3.0 profiles.Currently these boards will support from day zero or later AMD EXPO profiles for memories designed for AMD CPUs.In this case, as well as during the analysis of the Raptor Lake processors, we have used a Kingston Fury Beast RGB memory kit of 5600 MHz with XMP 3.0 profile to adapt to the native capacity of the 13th generation CPUs.With them, transfers of over 75,000 MB/s are achieved, surpassing the AMD Ryzen Zen 4 processors with 6400 MHz memories, showing that Intel is one step ahead in this performance section.The configuration of expansion slots of this MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI remains the same as in the Carbon version of the Z690 platform, but obviously the way in which some of them operate varies.We have a total of 3 PCIe slots for expansion cards, two of them in x16 format and another in x1 format, which will work as follows:To these are added 5 M.2 slots along with 6 SATA III 6 Gbps ports, which are located on a panel on the right side of the plate oriented 90º to improve access from the chassis cable storage area.In both cases there is support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, as well as Intel Rapid Storage for the M.2 slots.The operation will be as follows:In this way, the 16+4 lanes provided by the CPU are consumed, along with 16+1 lanes from the chipset, and there is still room for more connections without the need to share the bus.Network connectivity remains unchanged in this MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI, integrating an Intel I225-V chip with 2.5 Gbps bandwidth through the RJ45 port, and an Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 wireless card.This offers us a bandwidth of 2.4 Gbps for 5 GHz and 6 GHz thanks to the support of 160 MHz channels, and 574 Mbps for 2.4 GHz, incorporating Bluetooth 5.2 and ODFMA, MU-MIMO and BSS Color technologies among others.Its sound card does not seem to have changed either, since the latest generation Realtek ALC4080 codec has been used, supporting 7.1 audio.Supports stereo input and output signal up to 32 bits / 384 kHz, 120 dB SNR rear output and 110 dB SNR input.It will not be accompanied by a DAC, which would have been a successful upgrade, but it does use premium-level Japanese Nippon Chemicon capacitors.We go to see the connectivity for peripherals of the MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI, whose rear panel consists of:Panel that increases the general bandwidth of its ports by eliminating v2.0 and adding a second USB-C at 10 Gbps, in addition to Gen2x2 at 20 Gbps.Not only the buttons for BIOS control have been included, but also the so-called Smart Button whose function can be customized from the BIOS, it works just like the Asus FlexKey or the Gigabyte Multi-Key.The internal connections will be the following:Front connectivity also increases substantially to support up to 13 additional USB ports, one of them at 20 Gbps, having plenty of 2.0 headers for lighting controllers or extras that gaming chassis incorporate.We proceed to test this MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI board with the Intel Core i9-13900K, performing stress tests for the VRM or overclocking the CPU.The test bench is completed with the following elements:Intel Core i9-13900KThis board features a single 256 MB CMOS chip to store the UEFI BIOS, which provides a standard and advanced display mode identical to previous generations.In the easy mode we can view information about the main hardware and quick options such as fTPM, EZ LED, Debug LED, fan failure alert and access the M-Flash mode and hardware monitor.From here you can activate the XMP profiles showing XMP and EXPO support, CPU Boost mode, manage the boot order and access to the fan control tool.We have lacked a switch to manage Resizable BAR, which is activated by default.In the advanced mode we will access the energy and performance management of RAM and CPU, as well as the options related to the operation of slots and connections of the board.We have individual or joint frequency management in P-Core and E-Core cores, with a section dedicated to PL1, PL2 and Tau power control, among other parameters, to get the most out of Intel -K CPUs.We will stress test the CPU in its stock configuration.We collect surface temperatures with a FLIR One thermal camera and internal temperatures from HWiNFO.The VRM increases the power of its MOSFETS, but those almost 300W that the CPU reaches at maximum stress make a dent in their temperatures, reaching averages of almost 90ºC and peaks of 93ºC.That is why we must ensure good air regeneration inside the chassis that allows all that heat to be dissipated effectively.In the stock configuration, we also see how the BIOS has no consumption limit in PL1 and PL2, giving free rein to the processor so that, the better its cooling, the more power it reaches.This makes it easy for us to reach 100ºC on average, also causing great heating around the socket.We have overclocked directly from the BIOS by setting a frequency of P-core @5.6 GHz and E-core @4.4 GHz, at a voltage of 1.34V on all cores.It remains stable with an LLC in mode 5, although it is inevitable to get thermal throttling under continuous stress even using a 360mm RL.We recall that the voltage set on the 12900K was exactly 1.34V @5.2GHz, so we see an improvement in the voltage/frequency ratio for Raptor Lake.We are testing the BIOS in its version E7D89IMS from 12/9/2022 which is working with stock voltages of 1.28V on average @5.5 GHz P-core and @4.3 GHz E-core, and peaks of 1.47V when Boost mode is activated at 5.8GHz. They are pretty well adjusted registers as standard considering that with 5.6GHz it shoots at 1.34V, so there is little room for improvement for temperatures except to fix limit the PL1 and PL2.Z790 will continue to be a mere update of the Z690 boards, and therefore many of its elements will be similar to previous models.This Carbon in particular has the same network and sound card configuration, slightly modifying its design by adding a detail such as the quick anchor system for the heatsink of the main M.2 slot or quick anchors for SSDs in all slots.Both in internal and external connectivity there are novelties, highlighting in the first case the 5 M.2 slots that become 4 of Gen4 and one of them Gen5 to compete with AMD X670E.In the rear port panel we have the same amount of 10 ports, but now all of them are 5 Gbps or higher, and it greatly improves the internal capacity with the possibility of up to 13 front ports and 4 headers for RGB controls or the like.We recommend you take a look at the best motherboards on the marketIn the power section, the power of the VRM has been increased a lot, with 105A MOSFETS, but keeping a heatsink practically the same has not favored temperatures at all, exceeding 91ºC with the i9-13900K under stress.The consumption graph shows less stability, due to throttling and slightly weaker Vdroop and PL2 control.This can be solved by touching some BIOS parameters, but at the level of stock voltages and overclocking stability, it is quite well adjusted.The price for this MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI will be €580, about €125 more expensive than the Z690 Carbon at its start.It is still a somewhat more affordable high-end model than the Asus Z790 ROG Strix with similar features.For similar price and features it wouldn't make sense to upgrade from a Z690 board to this one, although it can be a solid high-end option for a new Raptor-based setup, always ensuring good cooling inside the chassis to control its VRM.The Professional Review team awards you the platinum medal:MSI MPG Z790 Carbon WIFI is a high-end motherboard with enhanced features for the most demanding users and Raptor Lake CPU. 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