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

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. 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. To the right of that top fan header are 3-pin ARGB and 4-pin RGB headers. In total, there are two of each, the others located on the bottom of the motherboard. If the RGBs hiding below the chipset heatsink aren’t enough, you can use these headers to add more. RGB control goes through the Dragon Center software suite and Mystic Light application.

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 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. 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. Points were deducted for OCing not just because of poor memory compatibility that other manufacturers are doing substantially better with on 2000 series CPUs but also because read, write, and copy tests are all worse than other X570 boards I've tested (all using the Kelvv BoltX 3600MHz kit) by a good 5GB/s or so and latency is about 3ns worse. In terms of real world such as gaming this can be the difference of up to about 6FPS on a 6800XT at 1080p and 4-5FPS even at 1440p. I did also test a 3700X in the Tomahawk after the review and things did not improve with memory compatibility and performance.For load testing we're running the Blender Gooseberry workload for an hour on an open air test bench with no direct air flow. Normally we also test inside a PC case but for the X570 testing we skipped this step as the plan was to re-test over twenty X570 motherboards once the Ryzen 9 3950X was released. As it turned out, the 3950X was no more power demanding than the 3900X, so a re-test wasn't warranted. We don't plan to make a thorough review of every aspect of the Tomahawk (see a full list of specs here), we've already tested over a dozen AMD X570 motherboards, and our recommendations can be found in the corresponding buying guide.

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. The DRAM voltage issue is still present annoyingly, due to the delays I didn’t have time to re-test the other memory kits to see if the Tomahawks memory compatibility is any better. Three out of five issues fixed or patched is pretty good so hopefully another UEFI revision or two will sort these things out fully. 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. Connect Line-Out (Speaker Out) to Line-In on the rear IO with a 3.5mm male to male stereo cable, something with gold plated connections and adequate shielding on the cable is preferable for the most accurate results. Realtek Ethernet (if theres one thing about Realtek thats stand out good its that driver support for their hardware lasts practically forever)

Moving past the Asus and Gigabyte boards, perhaps most important of all is the 63 degree drop in PCB temperature from the horrible Gaming Edge WiFi.