Joined in 2023 
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Memory Support DDR5 7800+(OC)/ 7600(OC)/ 7400(OC)/ 7200(OC)/ 7000(OC)/ 6800(OC)/ 6600(OC)/ 6400(OC)/ 6200(OC)/ 6000(OC)/ 5800(OC)/ 5600(OC)/ 5400(OC)/ 5200(OC)/ 5000(OC)/ 4800(JEDEC) MHz Appreciate the detail of the review but disagree strongly with your priorities and I'll be buying this board anyway. 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. Next we have the AIDA64 results, nothing out of the ordinary here to talk about so let’s move straight on to the gaming benchmarks.
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.
Lightning Fast Game experience: PCIe 4.0, Lightning Gen4 x4M.2 with M.2 Shield Frozr, StoreMI, AMD Turbo USB 3.2Gen 2 The next stop is the firmware all images have been taken from firmware 7C84v15, I’ll admit this review got delayed where I wanted to wait for this firmware release because earlier versions, to be as succinct as possible, were below par, missing features of older AM4 boards, questionable memory compatibility, old bugs rearing up again older chipsets have long since had firmware updates to resolve, etc. And yes, it is UEFI, not “BIOS”, the latter is simply a component of the former now this link will give you some of the simpler reasons why this is now the case. 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.
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. 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. If you want to run your own RMAA tests using the same criteria I do you can do so by following these steps; 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) 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 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. Realtek Ethernet (if theres one thing about Realtek thats stand out good its that driver support for their hardware lasts practically forever) 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. You claim the inclusion of WiFi takes away the 'far more important' features of... a need for more than SEVEN USB-A plus one USB-C slot on the rear... and quality audio - but anyone who actually cares about their audio is NEVER using onboard motherboard audio. No exceptions. The WiFi is more important than both of these. 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. 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.
Frozr Heatsink Design:Designed with the patented fan and double ball bearings to provide the best performance for enthusiast gamers and prosumers.For a game that leans on the GPU heavily these results are pretty good giving the 1080p and 1440p results a small but healthy bump, at 4K we are completely GPU limited so it should come as no surprise that things remain unchanged here. Taking a look at the VRM and DIMM banks topology the Tomahawk appears to be a Daisy Chain, the VRMs are the one real highlight in this tear down consisting of Intersil ISL99360 BFRZ rated for 60A, the controller is the Intersil ISL69247 IRZ which is 8 phase configured for 6+2 and also used are the Intersil ISL6617 phase doublers. On the other end of the scale we have the On-Semi 4C024 rated for 78A and 4C029 rated for 46A. These are all good components there’s nothing to really turn your nose up at here. For comparison the X470 GPC I reviewed used the IR35201 configured for 5+2, On-Semi 4C024 and 4C029 as well as the IR3598 phase doublers so there is actually very little difference between the two boards here.
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