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. 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. 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.

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.Supports PCIe 3.0 x4 (2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™/ Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Graphics) Frozr Heatsink Design:Designed with the patented fan and double ball bearings to provide the best performance for enthusiast gamers and prosumers. And as in new build goes, well, I do believe the MAG X570S Tomahawk MAX WiFi, despite being the best of the three, does not bring enough on the table to motivate the extra expenditure when compared to its X570 but most noticeably its B550 siblings. Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Graphics support PCIe 3.0 x8 mode

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.

I am by no means an audiophile nor am I the type of person to go spending thousands on equipment for near imperceptible differences but like everybody I do expect the hardware to do the task it is meant for to an acceptable standard and in this regard the MSI attempt at audio is not even close to acceptable on the Noise test or the THD + Noise and IMD + Noise tests, these are differences that you can hear through speakers or headphones and we will get in to this shortly. We are dealing with 14 60 amps Powers stages, 12 of which are CPU centric.We have 12 direct phases, delivering a whooping 720 AMPs to our CPU. 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.

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;

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 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. I’m also hard pressed to find any reason to justify the 2.5Gbit LAN and the on-board WIFI, the 2.5G LAN you’d need an internet connection of being able to take advantage of it and considering the majority of ISPs cap at 1Gbit it becomes a flip of the coin as to if that 2.5G LAN is really welcome and the included WIFI isn’t anything special either I tested it with a cheap USB adapter that uses a Realtek chip and it didn’t perform any better making the only point in the WIFI being the Bluetooth and when you can easily go out and get a USB Bluetooth adapter it renders the included WIFI also worthless especially as the space and costs saved could have easily gone to adding USB ports on the rear IO which are just infinitely more useful. I really don’t like that PS2 port either with so few USB ports, get rid of it and add more USB ports. Now for testing, my RMAA results will differ from most as I test with the system loaded not idle because this is when EMI and crosstalk potential is going to be at the highest levels, and guess what sorts of scenarios this happens in, Yup, gaming, so testing this way will give you a more accurate representation of how the audio will perform in actual usage and why I test the audio with a gaming benchmark in addition to RMAA. 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.

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) 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. The Mag X570 Tomahawk boasts a durable and reliable construction, utilizing premium materials for long-term usage. It features multiple cooling solutions, including heatsinks and fan headers, to effectively dissipate heat and maintain optimum performance even under heavy and prolonged use.Well obviously its an excellent gaming board, maybe the best in its price range when compared to its competition, but despite all of the incremental upgrades, it is one too many. I think you can all probably guess what I’m going to bring up next... the horribly, and needlessly, bloated UI. Just look at all of that wasted space this UI could be much more compact and every bit as easy to use what is it with all these unnecessarily bloated UI’s over the last couple years? 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.