Overclocking

We managed to hit 5GHz with our Core i9-9900K but only after applying maximum load-line calibration following some suspected vdroop, which saw the board fail to pass our stress test even with a fairly generous 1.28V vcore applied. We could then reign in the vcore to 1.26V, keeping our all-core overclock at 5GHz to match the rest of the field. This also ironed out some stock speed issues where we saw the board regularly failing to hit the all-core turbo boost of the CPU, which undoubtedly lead to some of the slower results compared to the other boards. You can see our in-depth overview of MSI's latest EFI and software here.

Performance Analysis

Focusing first on those slower numbers, both HandBrake and Cinebench were a little slower than we'd expect; as we're using the same CPU and memory, there should be very little variation between boards. The MSI MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC was 100 points adrift in Cinebench and a second slower in HandBrake; as we noted earlier, this seemed to be due to the board not holding the all-core boost very well.

In lightly-threaded tests there was less variation, and in fact it topped the Far Cry 5 benchmark and sat middle of the road in the storage tests. Being the only board we've tested so far without an M.2 heatsink, this does seem to lead to slightly lower write speeds, and this is something we've seen before. Audio performance was as expected from the dated ALC892 codec with all results well below that of other boards. Finally, power consumption and the load power draw at stock speed was much lower than the rest of the field, indicating its lack of all-core boost aggression, although this was fixed with a manual overclock. At idle, it was the most power-frugal board here.

Conclusion

The cuts made to networking, audio, USB, cooling, and lighting mean that Gigabyte's mini-ITX Z390 board, which costs just £25 more, is far more desirable in terms of features for not a lot more cash. Apart from the all-core boosting niggles, though, MSI has made a fairly solid effort with the MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC. At £135 it's certainly an option for those on a budget looking to build a small Z390 gaming rig - you can't get a Z390 mini-ITX board for less, after all.