MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk Review

A Tomahawk Tour

The top right of the Tomahawk has a lot going on. We find the fan and pump headers in their rightful place above the DIMM slots with two more system fan headers on the right hand edge. Between those is the first of a pair of Rainbow LED headers.

  

In the midboard we find the front panel Type-C USB 3.2 Gen1 header. Front panel USB Type-C isn’t that common on the B550 platform so MSI deserve some credit here.

  

The fastest speeds might come from M.2 these days, as the forthcoming consoles will attest, but SATA is still not a slow transfer speed for the majority of uses and the Tomahawk is supplied with six 6Gb/s ones.

  

The bottom right corner is where the majority of the connections occur, with front panel headers sitting below a pair of rainbow and regular RGB LED headers, and another system fan connector. Alongside that the 19 pin Type-A USB 3.2 Gen1 and pair of USB 2.0 headers provide all your internal USB needs.

  

Finally in the bottom left corner we find the front panel audio, an RGB LED strip header and another fan header. We like the onboard LED switch too for a quick and dirty stealth mode.

  

Power is provided by a 10+2+1 system with 10 Duet Rail SPS rocking 60A for a beefy power setup, whilst there are two SOC power phases and one to handle the APU power and Load-Line Calibration. We’ve seen good results from some of the 50A power stages we’ve reviewed so far so the Tomahawk should have more than enough to handle our Ryzen 9.

  

Finally the IO section has a BIOS flash button, a PS/2 combo port – the first we’ve seen on a B550 motherboard, USB 2.0 and both DisplayPort and HDMI display options. Moving rightwards we next find USB 3.2 Gen1 (the 5Gbps one) sitting below the Realtek RTL8125B 2.5G LAN port, whilst the USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) in Type-A and Type-C find a home below the Realtek RTL8111H 1G LAN port, before we end up at the audio jacks for the ALC1200 audio.