MSI MAG X570 TOMAHAWK WIFI Motherboard ATX - Supports AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Processors, AM4 - Mystic Light, DDR4 Boost (5100MHz/OC), 2 x PCIe 4.0 x16, 2 x M.2 Gen4 x4, HDMI, 2.5G LAN, Wi-Fi 6E

Product Information

Set Core Power Free: Extended Heatsink Design, Core Boost, Digital PWM IC, 8+4 pin CPU power connectors, Game Boost, DDR4 Boost

Only support when using Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Graphics Processors Frozr Heatsink Design: Designed with the patented fan and double ball bearings to provide the best performance for enthusiast gamers and prosumers. It's also a significant improvement over the Asus TUF Gaming which is one of our favorite X570 motherboards at this price point. The Tomahawk lowers the PCB temperature by an incredible 16 degrees over the TUF and that also makes it 25 degrees cooler than the Gigabyte Aorus Elite. We believe the Aorus Elite cooler can't handle the thermal output as well as the TUF cooler in this test, which is why it performs much worse than what we saw in the PBO testing, some direct air flow would likely bring these boards closer together. Seven USB ports really isn't enough and I'll give a basic example. Keyboard & mouse, thats 2 USB ports gone. Happen to have a mouse mat that has LED lighting? Another USB port gone. Got a webcam and microphone? Thats two more USB ports gone. If you also happen to have a thumb drive you leave in for firmware updates theres another USB port gone for that as well. Thats 6 out of 7 ports gone right away, add to that a lot of people also have multiple external drives and one or two remaining USB ports isn't enough, not at all. We'll forget about the type C as you can plug a phone in to charge other ways.Now for the final part of this peoples review it is time to see how the X570 Tomahawk OCs and to see if there are any firmware bugs to report on.

Cutting out the chuff we are going to get straight to where people will spend most of their time, the OC menu. With UEFI 1.5 you’ll finally have a complete set of options I won’t praise or judge for it taking until this point to happen as it is hard to know if the fault lays with MSI or AMD in this instance due to the AGESA code but it certainly would have been nice to have more refined firmware for the board earlier than this point. I do like how you literally have every tool for OCing at your disposal including the more obscure ones like CPU switching frequency and Spread Spectrum although the latter you can only enable or disable which is a bit annoying and certainly limits the usefulness of Spread Spectrum when trying to get rid of some EMI but chances are it won’t do much for EMI anyway. And as for the VRMs, this is a top priority for me but what I didn't realise was that some B550 boards rival this board on VRMs (B550 Aorus Master is actually better).Well obviously its an excellent gaming board, maybe the best in its price range when compared to its competition, but despite all of the incremental upgrades, it is one too many. And that all translate in a cool and efficient VRM, even in the most demanding and continuous load. MSI MAG X570S TOMAHAWK MAX WiFi

As shift focus down to the bottom half of the board, we find M.2 storage, PCIe slots, and the audio bits. Starting on the left side, we spy the naked Realtek ALC40480 codec and a few yellow Nichicon audio caps. Also visible is the audio separation line that’s designed to minimize EMI for the other parts of the board. I’m happy to see MSI went with a newer audio codec versus saving a few pennies on the last-generation codec. Most users will be perfectly content with the audio on the X570S Tomahawk. Speaking of components capacitors on the board are standard looking through hole polymer, I’ll guess they have a lifetime guarantee of 5000hrs, but could be anywhere between 1000hrs and 5000hrs. I’d hope they are the upper end of that scale as pricing is negligible for much better caps, for example when looking on farnell.co.uk a 105c rated 6.3v Panasonic 560μF polymer through hole 5000hr capacitor is 25.9 pence per piece while a 6.3v 105c rated KEMET 560μF polymer through hole capacitor specified for a mere 2000hrs is 24.7 pence per piece. 1.2 pence for a much more durable capacitor is nothing at all so there’s no reason not to use higher life guarantee capacitors for extra durability. The Mag X570 Tomahawk boasts a durable and reliable construction, utilizing premium materials for long-term usage. It features multiple cooling solutions, including heatsinks and fan headers, to effectively dissipate heat and maintain optimum performance even under heavy and prolonged use. If wifi\LAN is an important factor for someone you sure as hell won't be using the on-board AX200 or Realtek 8125B you're going to be using something much higer end like a 10GbE PCIe LAN card, for all other uses 1GbE ethernet is still ample. Glad you like the review, I always appreciate other viewpoints I'm not one of these delicate flowers that gets all emotional but there were specific reasons for my conclusions beyond the details I went into so I'll list them now;Realtek Ethernet (if theres one thing about Realtek thats stand out good its that driver support for their hardware lasts practically forever)

Things like this is why I test with a slightly older CPU to see if the level of standards you would expect extend to the slightly older hardware as well because most people do incremental upgrades when the time is right, not all at once so it is very common to see a slightly older CPU on a up to date mainboard either because upgrades are being done incrementally or because a certain CPU was significantly cheaper than the newer ones while still offering a large portion of the performance the newer CPUs offer. Here we are at the end of the road, and one that not only had some unexpected turns but a road that was longer than I would have liked it to be. Mainboard manufacturers really don’t like making their hardware easy to review do they? We’ll be doing much the same as I did for the Powercolor 6800XT review and getting the miscellaneous things out of the way with first before breaking into the scoring to keep things as easy to follow as possible. Across the bottom are several headers, including RGB, USB and more. There’s also a convenient switch in this area to disable the integrated RGB LEDs. Here’s the complete list, from left to right: Looking at competing boards such as the Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus and Gigabyte Aorus Elite, those boards both use a dozen Vishay SIC639 50A power stages which are basic DRMOS components with basically no current or temperature monitoring. The smart power stages used by the Tomahawk feature current and temperature monitoring, and then of course they're rated for 60A, so will support higher currents. By default MSI uses a 500 KHz CPU switching frequency for both boards and Buildzoid calculates that at 1.2v with a 200A draw the Gaming Edge VRM puts out 46 watts of heat and that would explain why these boards run so hot given a 3950X will pull around 170-190A with PBO enabled. Meanwhile Buildzoid also calculates that the new Tomahawk board will generate just 17 watts of heat under the exact same conditions. That's over a 60% reduction in thermal output.

and you don't mention using a WiFi 6 router - of course it won't be much better than a cheap USB WiFi dongle if you're using a WiFi 5 router) And as in new build goes, well, I do believe the MAG X570S Tomahawk MAX WiFi, despite being the best of the three, does not bring enough on the table to motivate the extra expenditure when compared to its X570 but most noticeably its B550 siblings. Right, to the RMAA results the first two charts are for people less experienced with audio to show more clearly what is considered good and bad the Xonar will go first;