Both motherboards are identical to the company’s existing X99A Godlike Gaming Edition and Z170A Gaming Pro Edition motherboards but now feature a full black color scheme with new and improved Mystic Light.
According to MSI, the latter feature “combines flashiness with sophistication that is sure to make your PC stand out.” The boards also feature metal railings to give GPU more stability and to prevent them from sagging when mounted horizontally or with waterblocks. MSI calls this feature SteelArmor, which has additional solder points on the PCB to add strength and is designed to protect data signals against any electromagnetic interference.
Recently, some X99 motherboard manufacturers including MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte have started including additional pins on the Intel's X99 2011v3 socket to allow for additional overclocking headroom. The MSI X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon Edition features 2036 pins in total to allow adjusting specific voltages in the BIOS for extreme liquid nitrogen overclocking.
The MSI X99A Carbon Edition supports up to 128GB of DDR4 3400MHz and features five PCI-Express 3.0 slots (run at x16/x0/x0/x0/x0 or x16/x0/x0/x16/x0, x16/x0/x0/x8/x0 or x16/x0/x0/x16/x8, x8/x8/x0/x8/x0 or x8/x8/x0/x16/x8, x8/x8/x0/x8/x4). The board also comes with one Turbo M.2 32Gbps slot, two USB 3.1 10Gbps (generation II ports) ports, eight USB 3.1 5Gbps (generation I) ports, ten SATA III 6Gbps ports, one SATA Express port, Realtek 7.1 HD audio, two Killer E2400 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11ac 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.
The MSI Z170A Gaming Pro supports up to 64GB of DDR4 3600MHz and features three PCI-Express 3.0 slots (runs at x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4 modes), three PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slots and one PCI Slot. The board also comes with one Turbo M.2 32Gbps slot, two USB 3.1 10Gbps (generation II) ports, six USB 3.1 5Gbps (generation I) ports, six SATA III 6Gbps ports, one SATA Express port, Realtek 7.1 HD audio and one Intel I219-V Gigabit Ethernet port.
Pricing and a release date for these motherboards are not yet available but we should have more information soon.