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. Equipped with high-quality audio components and advanced audio processing technologies, this motherboard delivers an immersive sound experience, enhancing your gaming, movie-watching, and music-listening pleasure. 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. Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors, 1st and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics Processors support DDR4 1866/ 2133/ 2400/ 2667/ 2800/ 2933/ 3000/ 3066/ 3200 Mhz by JEDEC

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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. Lightning Fast Game experience: PCIe 4.0, Lightning Gen4 x4 M.2 with M.2 Shield Frozr, StoreMI, AMD Turbo USB 3.2 Gen 2

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. Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors support DDR4 1866/ 2133/ 2400/ 2667/ 2800/ 2933/ 3000/ 3066/ 3200 Mhz by JEDEC, and 2667/ 2800/ 2933/ 3000/ 3066/ 3200/ 3466/ 3600/ 3733/ 3866/ 4000/ 4133/ 4266/ 4400/ 4533/ 4600+ Mhz by A-XMP OC MODE 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. Appreciate the detail of the review but disagree strongly with your priorities and I'll be buying this board anyway. 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.Now for the final part of this peoples review it is time to see how the X570 Tomahawk OCs and to see if there are any firmware bugs to report on.