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

For 4. (wifi) I'm sure it performs the same as any AX200 WiFi 6 adapter on the market which is why I reject your criticism of it. Set Core Power Free: Extended Heatsink Design, Core Boost, Digital PWM IC, 8+4 pin CPU power connectors, GameBoost, DDR4 Boost

I do like that the Tomahawk doesn’t light up like Mardi-Grass if you want LED lighting that’s what LED fans, strips, cathode lights, etc are for and you can replace those when they start to dim or become faulty no such ability with mainboards incorporating lighting. I don’t like that despite all of the effects you can choose from that you can’t customise the colour on all of them which quite severely affects the entire point of having LEDs on the board to begin with. A look at the integrated components doesn’t reveal much it is better than average with the 2.5Gbit RTL8125B, intel AX200 WIFI and Realtek ALC1200 but I’m willing to bet the LAN makes no difference to the majority of people over the more standard Realtek L8200A (1Gbit) LAN. The cost of that WIFI module is really starting to have detrimental impacts at this point I feel not including it definitely would have allowed for higher quality components overall and extra USB ports. 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. MSI's new Tomahawk is the most impressive X570 motherboard we've tested at this price point. Like we just said, it's a shame we had to wait so long. MSI certainly didn't get it right the first time, but so far the do-over at a few different price points is working out great.

Benchmarks

Military style with Pre-installed IO shielding, tuned for better performance by Core Boost, DDR4 Boost, M.2 Shield Frozr, Wi-Fi 6, Frozr Heatsink Design, Lightning Gen4 Our primary focus will be on testing VRM thermal performance as this is a key differentiator among these motherboards that will house a powerful new generation Ryzen processor. The VRM is not something that can be easily upgraded either. But before we jump into that, we should note that the Tomahawk does offer some new features over the Gaming Edge such as 2.5 Gbit networking, an additional USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB port and the Wi-Fi has been upgraded to Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 with Bluetooth 5.0. Other than that, it's very similar to what we saw before in terms of design, VRM excluded, of course.

Finally we're not reporting Delta T over Ambient, instead we maintain a room temperature of ~21 degrees. We have a thermocouple sitting next to the test system monitoring room temp. The results are in and they are good, very good, dethroning the reigning champion of 3 years, the X370 Titanium, is deserving of applause thermal load balancing is clearly not an issue here either despite there being no heatpipe, I would still like to see one on every board though especially the ones that have very minimal VRM heatsinks. I did also peek at chipset temperatures and with an idle load and default fan speed (none) for me it runs a little warm at 54c, this is quite typical for an X570 chipset but an extremely minimal 15% of the chipset fans maximum RPM will drop that temp to about 43c which is much better. Do the chipset a favour and use some nice thermal paste with a tiny amount of airflow it’ll thank you for it. The worst issue though was with memory I used several different kits on the board all using different ICs including Samsung B-Die, Micron E-Die, Hynix DJR, and Hynix MFR. The B-Die kit seemed ok but all of the Hynix and Micron kits had varying degrees of success the Micron kit particularly did not want to work on the Tomahawk one set of DIMM banks the board outright refused to POST and the other set of DIMM banks the most I could coax out of the kit was 2933MHz and that was the kit of Crucial Ballistix I reviewed so know full well the kit is capable of at least 3333MHz. The kit I ended up using for this review is the Klevv BoltX[/u] which as it turns out is on the Tomahawks QVL list for 3000 and 5000 series CPUs while very similar kits from Klevv are on the memory QVL for the 2000 series CPUs. Even with this kit however the Tomahawk still would not POST at some frequencies without the XMP profile being enabled which is quite unusual, the board really doesn’t have a clue on how to set memory timings when left to its own devices. Don’t be fooled by the memory QVL list for the 2000 series CPUs for the Tomahawk at a glance it looks impressive but on slightly closer inspection you will notice the vast, vast, VAST majority are Samsung B-Die kits, not Hynix or Micron. Other manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte are doing far better on their QVLs for 2000 series CPUs when it comes to actual tested IC variety which is far more important than number of tested brands all using the same ICs. Appreciate the detail of the review but disagree strongly with your priorities and I'll be buying this board anyway. As it left less than a pleasant impression during the RMAA tests the ALC1200 has the chance to draw first blood in the subjective audio test, with no equaliser sounds are muddy, muffled, and flat sounding like everything was being spewed out across the same channel, the audio just has no life or soul, or depth, definition, and clarity if you prefer.

Military style with Pre-installed IO shielding, tuned for better performance by Core Boost, DDR4 Boost, M.2 Shield Frozr, Wi-Fi 6, Frozr Heatsink Design, Lightning Gen4

I am absolutely elated by the fact the Tomahawk is not loaded with LEDs but the placement of the few LEDs the board does have I don’t like, MSI for reasons that I’m quite sure absolutely nobody can fathom still insist on placing the LEDs on the rear of the board at the edge near the DIMM banks, this position someone clearly has a real turn on for heh... lights, turn on and off, yes, another intended pun. The most logical place to put LEDs if you are going to use them is somewhere you can’t easily illuminate yourself if you want to, like as part of the shroud over the rear IO like on the X470 GPC (you’re going to see this board referenced a lot). Finally coming to the M.2 slots I am pleased to see both of them have a heatsink, you either include heatsinks for every M.2 slot you have on the board or don’t include any there is no halfway house here because people like to match things like that up. This is where we would usually take a look at the MSI Command Centre and I would heap praise on it for the versatility it has but MSI have replaced the Command Centre with “Dragon Centre”, the latter is total poison being a regression in every way compared to Command Centre I wouldn’t waste your time, or mine, with it in this review but even the stand alone Mystic Light has been axed and melded with this monstrosity so to look at the LED functionality of the Tomahawk we are all going to have to suffer through this. 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: 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. Available only on processors featuring integrated graphics. Graphics specifications may vary depending on the CPU installed.