How I OC has changed a bit since the R7 1700 days I mainly now look to optimise CPU frequency with required voltage, in this area the X570 Tomahawk performed well getting up to 4200MHz with 1.35v, the X470 Carbon couldn’t manage this with even up to 1.4v which is curious given that the board has a VRM that is still pretty strong so without more time it’s difficult to say what the issue here was. Memory results are as good as you can expect from a 2700X really so unsurprisingly all is square here between the Tomahawk and Carbon. PCI_E4 & M2_4 share the bandwidth. M2_4 will run at x2 speed when installing device in the PCI_E4 slot. MSI could have done better with the Tomahawk without increasing production costs, likely reducing them in fact, with only minor changes. I didn't really detail it too much but I would have made a second non WIFI SKU Tomahawk that had the following; Unsurprisingly there is nothing unusual or out of place here, I will make a note that the newer AMD drivers look to have fixed Gears 5 performance at 1080p where it has jumped about 10FPS. Tomb Raider results are also interesting as the system managed 121FPS average for both 1080p and 1440p.

To record the temperatures we're using a digital thermometer with K-Type thermocouples and we're reporting peak MOSFET surface and rear PCB temperature. For the MOSFETS this means we're measuring the temperature directly on top of the component, between it and the thermal pad and not the internal temperature which is bound to be a little higher. Still with all boards tested under the exact same conditions that will give us a clear picture of how the VRM temperatures compare. 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.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. When compared to the Gaming Edge, the board the Tomahawk is replacing, we see a 48 degree drop in PCB temperature. It's also 15 degrees cooler than the TUF Gaming and 5 degrees cooler than the Aorus Elite which performs very well under this load. 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.

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. Taking a closer look at the Tomahawk itself nothing stands out as being a particular weakness but I am going to point out the awful placement of the fan headers, you have one 4 pin header either side of the DIMM banks and the rest are lazily shuffled along the bottom of the board in a “just let the user deal with it” manner. We collectively established many years ago MSI that a fan header mid board for rear intake or exhaust fans is important, as is having one in the general area of the SATA ports for a side or front fan. On the plus side, with a total of 6 fan headers at least you still have more than the meagre 4 Gigabyte give you with the similarly priced Aorus Elite.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. 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: 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. On further investigation neither Nahimic 2.5+ or Nahimic 3 will function on the X570 Tomahawk meaning MSI haven’t paid a license fee to Nahimic for the Tomahawk, if you are a gamer who bought the Tomahawk and expected the Nahimic suit to be included I’d imagine you are feeling pretty miffed right about now getting this confirmation, and with good reason considering the price of the Tomahawk and the already cut down audio implementation. Perhaps in-use testing rather than a pure hardware analysis will reveal something that is not yet apparent. Moving on to talk about the VRM configuration, the X570 Tomahawk uses the ISL69247 controller of which six signals are taken for the vcore portion of the VRM and then doubled using ISL6617 phase doublers. Those 12 phases then connect to the stars of the show, a dozen ISL99360 60A power stages. In the previous Gaming Edge WiFi, MSI used an Infineon IR35201 controller with four signals for the vcore VRM, each doubled using an IR3598 phase doubler.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. I don’t think many people will have too much to complain about with the Tomahawk in terms of looks it’s quite an attractive board that will look good in any build, if it wasn’t for the placement of the LEDs the board does have instead integrating them as part of the rear IO shroud it would have scored higher that is one area that isn’t easily customised with lighting so the board would have been well served by having some there, we just don’t need LEDs near the DIMM slots anymore MSI because we have these doodads you might have heard of that have been around a while now called LED RAM coolers and these fancy things called LED memory modules. 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. It’s been a while since I’ve written a motherboard review so I thought it was about time for another peoples review taking a look at an X570 chipset mainboard. We will be looking at the X570 Tomahawk WIFI from MSI this time, there has been some really weird stuff going on at MSI in more recent times with a prominent individual committing suicide, shady practices whereby MSI try to strong arm reviewers into giving them favourable review scores and moderators in their forums threatening users who have a difference in opinion and politely explain why they are wrong about something and even give independent sources not just opinion to substantiate their claim(s). For these reasons I too will be distancing myself from MSI for the time being (but I will be keeping a close eye on you, MSI) after this review but let us push forward and try to focus on just the hardware, will the X570 Tomahawk “return to honour” as MSI like to say, or be dishonourably discharged? Let’s find out, and rest assured MSI are under an extra powerful microscope from me today with their recent behaviour and shenanigans I won’t be allowing them to get away with anything, not even the tiniest discretion.