![]() ![]() Secondly - "lack of Wifi", really? If you are using this board and overclocking for gaming (most would), one wouldn't game using a Wifi connection, but rather use the only board in the round that has 2 ethernet ports sporting 2.5G bandwidth. If you would like to see the difference please check out this article: ALC1200 vs 1220 (I hardly this this worth dinging the board for even a half star). By the way, the ALC1200 is a new chip manufactured in 2018 vs. The only cons were an Audio Realtek codec at 1200, however unless you have very specific needs (most of us don't) there is very little difference in the chips other than 10db increase on the already incredibly efficient 110 db with the ALC1200. I'm a little perplexed with the 3.5 star rating and this response isn't necessarily criticism of the author's review, but looking at the board of what really matters to the mainstream, which in my opinion doesn't yield a 3.5 star rating. Assuming these are not deal breakers for your build, the MSI B550 MAG Tomahawk deserves consideration if your budget is around the $180 mark. Some potential drawbacks are the six total USB count on the rear IO as well as the lesser audio codec compared to many other similar boards. Overclocking proved effortless in our testing - all we had to do was simply adjust known settings and go. Performance results matched or slightly surpassed the performance of the other boards tested. The MSI B550 MAG Tomahawk continues its streak of providing a good overall value, while delivering a solid VRM capable of driving AMD’s current processors. Here you’ll find several boards with very little difference between them, which makes choosing one over the other difficult as it boils down to price, aesthetics, and the minor features you need and want on your motherboard. MSI’s B550 Tomahawk resides in the very crowded $150-$200 segment of the B550 market. For the most part, the primary thing that separates these boards is listed memory support, though all should easily hit the 3600/3733 MHz ‘sweet spot’ for AMD, as mentioned. Out of these boards, the Tomahawk is the only one with two Ethernet ports (1 and 2.5 GbE), but like them, is missing Wi-Fi. Power delivery on all of these boards will be sufficient for, at least, an overclocked Ryzen 9 3900X as we saw during testing. The Asus is the most attractive of the group, while the Gigabyte has the most USB ports on the rear IO. Priced at $179.99 (opens in new tab), the B550 Tomahawk competes with boards such as the ASRock B550 Steel Legend ( $179.99 (opens in new tab)), Gigabyte's B550 Aorus Pro ($179.99), and the Asus Strix B550-F Gaming ( $189.99 (opens in new tab)) we recently reviewed. Our B550 Tomahawk happily booted right up with the XMP profile without additional tweaks and successfully completed our testing. With this in mind, we add two more sticks and run 4x8GB at DDR4 3600, which is AMD’s current sweet spot. On the memory side, we know AMD is limited to around 3600/3733 MHz when keeping FCLK at a 1:1 ratio with the memory. Vdroop was minimal and easily mitigated with LLC. The B550 Tomahawk handled our 12-core/24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X without issue. To that end, we use 4.3 GHz and 1.35V for an all core/thread overclock. While the latter clips peak single-threaded performance a bit, it increases all core/thread performance from base. If you can use all cores and threads, setting a manual CPU multiplier and voltage is likely the better route. If your focus is single-threaded performance, you may want to focus on using Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and adjusting its parameters. There are several ways to overclock on AMD platforms, depending on your goals. All temperatures are well within operating parameters - no worries here. When our CPU was overclocked to 4.3 GHz and 1.35V, VRTM temps went up to 48 degrees Celsius with, Hwinfo reporting 52 degrees. During stock runs, the hottest point on the VRM was 46 degrees Celsius, while in Hwinfo it topped out at 50 degrees Celsius. The B550 Tomahawk’s 10-phase, 60A power bits for the CPU handled our testing without issue. ![]()
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