MSI B350 Tomahawk Arctic & Mortar MATX 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 too. This is somewhat overkill given that most people will plump for the 1700 or Ryzen 5’s, 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 Arctics are concerned the overclocking was the same as the original Tomahawk, very easy with minimal work required. We squeezed 4 GHz out with only 1.4v on the VCore. Perhaps most impressively was how the Arctics handle 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. So all 3 boards with the same overclock, nicely done. On the results pages there was so little between the 3 boards (pretty much benchmark run tolerances) that we have rolled all 3 into one bar just top keep the graphs a bit cleaner and stop us from getting board entering endless numbers with a 1 point difference into a spreadsheet.

In BIOS updates since we have tested the normal Tomahawk MSI have rolled out the AGESA updates which basically affects memory latency and compatibility. Thankfully though this has not had the negative impact some other brands have been complaining of, the MSI A-XMP has got noticeably better and we would go as far to say right now the MSI Ryzen BIOS overall is probably the best out of the big manufacturers.