MSI B350 Tomahawk AM4 Motherboard Review

Test Setup

MSI B350 Tomahawk
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Corsair LPX 2666MHz
Corsair LPX 3000MHz
Corsair LPX 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H110i GT
Corsair ML Fans

Overclocking

For the purposes of providing a good comparison between the B350 and the X370 motherboards we’re running the B350 with our Ryzen 7 1800X. This is somewhat overkill given that most people will plump for the 1700 or be waiting to see what the Ryzen 5’s bring, but we wanted to discover if there was much of a compromise by going with a B350 equipped motherboard. Plus, who wants to look at a set of results with absolutely nothing to compare them to? Sure the 1800X really does stress the B350 lower spec board but being able to directly compare all motherboards by using the same CPU makes a lot more sense in our minds!
As far as the Tomahawk is concerned the overclocking was very good indeed, very easy with minimal work required. We squeezed 4 GHz out with only 1.4v on the VCore. Perhaps most impressively was how the Tomahawk handled the vDroop, dropping only 8 hundredths of a volt from 1.4v to 1.392v. Stability is the key. If you want some speedy memory to go alongside your processor then the Tomahawk has this covered too and we saw 3200 MHz on the DDR4 at the same time as we had the 4 GHz 1800X. Nicely done.

MSI are pushing their AMD version of XMP in a big way atm. On this board we couldnt find a memory kit it worked with though, it will likely be sorted failry rapidly as ALL brands are running around like headless chickens trying to get everything sorted. Its worth noting if you set the memory up manually its fine, so its clearly just something hinky in this early A-XMP bios on the B350.