and you don't mention using a WiFi 6 router - of course it won't be much better than a cheap USB WiFi dongle if you're using a WiFi 5 router) 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. How I OC has changed a bit since the R7 1700 days I mainly now look to optimise CPU frequency with required voltage, in this area the X570 Tomahawk performed well getting up to 4200MHz with 1.35v, the X470 Carbon couldn’t manage this with even up to 1.4v which is curious given that the board has a VRM that is still pretty strong so without more time it’s difficult to say what the issue here was. Memory results are as good as you can expect from a 2700X really so unsurprisingly all is square here between the Tomahawk and Carbon. We don't plan to make a thorough review of every aspect of the Tomahawk (see a full list of specs here), we've already tested over a dozen AMD X570 motherboards, and our recommendations can be found in the corresponding buying guide.

PCI_E4 & M2_4 share the bandwidth. M2_4 will run at x2 speed when installing device in the PCI_E4 slot. Just above the DRAM slots is the first (of six) 4-pin fan headers. The CPU_FAN1 header here automatically detects PWM/DC fans and outputs up to 2A/24W. The PUMP_FAN1 defaults to PWM mode and outputs up to 2A/24W, which is more than adequate for most pumps. Last, SYS_FAN1-4 defaults to DC mode and supports up to 1A/12W. All headers support both modes, with adjustments made in the BIOS. There are plenty of headers and enough output to run your cooling system. It's also a significant improvement over the Asus TUF Gaming which is one of our favorite X570 motherboards at this price point. The Tomahawk lowers the PCB temperature by an incredible 16 degrees over the TUF and that also makes it 25 degrees cooler than the Gigabyte Aorus Elite. We believe the Aorus Elite cooler can't handle the thermal output as well as the TUF cooler in this test, which is why it performs much worse than what we saw in the PBO testing, some direct air flow would likely bring these boards closer together.In the middle of the board, we spy two M.2 slots (under the heatsinks) and four PCIe slots. Starting with the latter, there are two full-size slots, with the primary (top) slot reinforced to prevent shearing from heavy graphics cards. These two slots both support PCIe 4.0 speeds, with the top running a full x16 and the bottom running up to x4 speeds. This configuration supports AMD 2-Way CrossfireX. The two x1 slots get their bandwidth from the chipset and run up to PCIe 3.0 x1. 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.

The DRAM voltage issue is still present annoyingly, due to the delays I didn’t have time to re-test the other memory kits to see if the Tomahawks memory compatibility is any better. Three out of five issues fixed or patched is pretty good so hopefully another UEFI revision or two will sort these things out fully. 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. Speaking of components capacitors on the board are standard looking through hole polymer, I’ll guess they have a lifetime guarantee of 5000hrs, but could be anywhere between 1000hrs and 5000hrs. I’d hope they are the upper end of that scale as pricing is negligible for much better caps, for example when looking on farnell.co.uk a 105c rated 6.3v Panasonic 560μF polymer through hole 5000hr capacitor is 25.9 pence per piece while a 6.3v 105c rated KEMET 560μF polymer through hole capacitor specified for a mere 2000hrs is 24.7 pence per piece. 1.2 pence for a much more durable capacitor is nothing at all so there’s no reason not to use higher life guarantee capacitors for extra durability.

Military style with Pre-installed IO shielding, tuned for better performance by Core Boost, DDR4 Boost, M.2 Shield Frozr, Wi-Fi 6, Frozr Heatsink Design, Lightning Gen4

Finally we're not reporting Delta T over Ambient, instead we maintain a room temperature of ~21 degrees. We have a thermocouple sitting next to the test system monitoring room temp. Unsurprisingly there is nothing unusual or out of place here, I will make a note that the newer AMD drivers look to have fixed Gears 5 performance at 1080p where it has jumped about 10FPS. Tomb Raider results are also interesting as the system managed 121FPS average for both 1080p and 1440p. For 4. (wifi) I'm sure it performs the same as any AX200 WiFi 6 adapter on the market which is why I reject your criticism of it. I do like that the Tomahawk doesn’t light up like Mardi-Grass if you want LED lighting that’s what LED fans, strips, cathode lights, etc are for and you can replace those when they start to dim or become faulty no such ability with mainboards incorporating lighting. I don’t like that despite all of the effects you can choose from that you can’t customise the colour on all of them which quite severely affects the entire point of having LEDs on the board to begin with. To record the temperatures we're using a digital thermometer with K-Type thermocouples and we're reporting peak MOSFET surface and rear PCB temperature. For the MOSFETS this means we're measuring the temperature directly on top of the component, between it and the thermal pad and not the internal temperature which is bound to be a little higher. Still with all boards tested under the exact same conditions that will give us a clear picture of how the VRM temperatures compare.

Connect Line-Out (Speaker Out) to Line-In on the rear IO with a 3.5mm male to male stereo cable, something with gold plated connections and adequate shielding on the cable is preferable for the most accurate results.If wifi\LAN is an important factor for someone you sure as hell won't be using the on-board AX200 or Realtek 8125B you're going to be using something much higer end like a 10GbE PCIe LAN card, for all other uses 1GbE ethernet is still ample. If you want to run your own RMAA tests using the same criteria I do you can do so by following these steps; Now for testing, my RMAA results will differ from most as I test with the system loaded not idle because this is when EMI and crosstalk potential is going to be at the highest levels, and guess what sorts of scenarios this happens in, Yup, gaming, so testing this way will give you a more accurate representation of how the audio will perform in actual usage and why I test the audio with a gaming benchmark in addition to RMAA. 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.