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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. Realtek Ethernet (if theres one thing about Realtek thats stand out good its that driver support for their hardware lasts practically forever)
If you want to run your own RMAA tests using the same criteria I do you can do so by following these steps; 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. 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 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. 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.Just above the DRAM slots is the first (of six) 4-pin fan headers. The CPU_FAN1 header here automatically detects PWM/DC fans and outputs up to 2A/24W. The PUMP_FAN1 defaults to PWM mode and outputs up to 2A/24W, which is more than adequate for most pumps. Last, SYS_FAN1-4 defaults to DC mode and supports up to 1A/12W. All headers support both modes, with adjustments made in the BIOS. There are plenty of headers and enough output to run your cooling system. 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. Available only on processors featuring integrated graphics. Graphics specifications may vary depending on the CPU installed.
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. 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. 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. 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 last test is just a formality at this point and sees the comparison against the Xonar DX, in terms of performance anomalies there are none and in fact the graph paints a picture of a more stable frame rate compared to the ALC1200 with less extreme low points. When talking about audio quality there could not be more of a difference the Xonar simply blows the ALC1200 away in every imaginable metric, depth is better, the audio has clarity, there is a hefty punch. It has life and soul. 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. 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. 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. Set Core Power Free: Extended Heatsink Design, Core Boost, Digital PWM IC, 8+4 pin CPU power connectors, GameBoost, DDR4 Boost
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. 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. 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; 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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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;
I never thought there would be a day when I would have to rate the accessories bundle below the automatic 5, but here we are, exclude what isn’t absolutely necessary, the WIFI antenna, driver DVD and manual and what are you left with? Two SATA cables, bloody two! Hands up who has more than two devices in their system that require the use of a SATA cable, I bet that’s 80% or more of you and exactly why MSI earns the dishonour of being the first to score below the automatically awarded 5 points for an “average” accessories bundle. You need to at least include enough SATA cables MSI to amount to half of the SATA ports on the board, that’s the rule for the accessories to be considered “average”. It is the lowest of bars, and you failed. 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. The firmware has slipped with the Tomahawk it’s quite good but pretty much unchanged from 3 years ago and the X370 boards, the UEFI is still on the buggy side even as of UEFI 1.5, MSI seem to be on the slow side with updates as well to fix these issues and memory compatibility with slightly older CPUs is not of the same standard as what Asus and Gigabyte offer, you want to test as many different ICs as you can, testing as many different memory brands as you can does not equate to testing as many IC types as you can. Asus and Gigabyte have fewer memory kits on their 2000 series QVL lists for X570 but they have tested a wider variety of memory ICs which will always lead to better compatibility. MSI could probably just transplant all the 2000 series CPU memory support from something like the X470 Gaming Pro Carbon and be done with these issues. I really don’t understand why MSI keep forcing the graph on users to set fan profiles either and not allowing direct key-in method as an option which is just much faster and easier. 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. 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.
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