Luxury motherboards are not meant to be balanced. If you're shelling out $350-plus for a motherboard, you expect to have more features than you're likely to need. You also expect killer design and build quality.

Support for 4-Way CrossFire or SLI; Game Boost OC knob; Three M.2 connectors; Wi-Fi add-on card; Strong accessory package; Swappable heatsink covers; Mystic Light LED scheme

Crowded design (in part, due to size of TR4 socket); Placement of front-panel header block; Luxury pricing

For this first X399 review, we have to include some comparison data. We seeded a mysterious challenger that will be covered in our next review. PCMark is our obligatory first benchmark to examine general purpose performance.

Reusable WiFi module; Overclocking stability; High end features analogous to other Gaming Pro motherboards

Slight performance hiccups; Slightly more expensive

AMD kicks the proverbial azz when they released Ryzen Threadripper, and with each week that passes the performance has been getting better up-to the point where it now is stabilizing. The main four board partners have produced really good motherboard.

Running an overclocked 1950x on this X399 board without issue. Zero problems out of the box and is feature complete compared to others in the same class. Recommended.

I've built four systems with this board. I like the BIOS, I like the I/O, it's easy to get reliable overclocking. Provided you've given it good ram and PSU. It can hold four GPUs with the proper case too. As always, update that BIOS before doing anything.

AMD's Threadripper series is a CPU intended for high-end workstations, e.g. UNIX machines running CAD, studio-grade video editing systems or heavy compilation loads spread across many CPU cores.

AMD's Ryzen Threadripper processors, teeming with cores, are among the best CPUs you can buy today for creative pursuits. They are certainly well-suited to content creation, but they have game. (See our review of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, for one.) And no motherboard maker is going to miss an opportunity to target lucrative community: PC gamers. MSI's X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC ($369.99 MSRP), as its name implies, tilts heavily toward gaming use. There aren't a lot of X399 motherboards on the market at all, and all are pricey, in the $300-plus range; we saw just six models at the time of the Ryzen Threadripper launch, and we still see less than 10 for sale on Newegg.com at this writing. This model provides an alternative to the more strait-laced (and slightly less expensive) MSI X399 SLI Plus. Now, Threadripper boards just aren't cheap, but the X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC's price tag was the full MSRP of $369.99 at Amazon. Even after a $20 mail-in rebate on offer, the boa...

If you're building a gaming PC around AMD's giant new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, the X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC is well worth a look. Although pricey, it has broad support for multi-GPU configurations and overclocking.

Support for 4-Way CrossFire or SLI; Game Boost OC knob; Three M.2 connectors; Wi-Fi add-on card; Strong accessory package; Swappable heatsink covers; Mystic Light LED scheme

Crowded design (in part, due to size of TR4 socket); Placement of front-panel header block; Luxury pricing