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MSI's £100 B350 Tomahawk is the first B350 motherboard to be put through our testing. Retaining the CPU overclocking support that makes the B350 chipset such an alluring option for AM4, MSI outfits its Tomahawk with the key features consumers are asking for, such as USB Type-C and M.2 PCIe NVMe support.
If you are in the market for a Ryzen 5 CPU and plan to overclock, the B350 chipset makes a great deal of sense. MSI knows this and therefore offers budget consumers its B350 Tomahawk which is equipped with a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe-capable M.2 slot, USB Type-C (albeit at 5Gbps 3.0 speeds), and a superb fan configuration to cool one's system.
Onboard LEDs are coloured in red but there is a 4-pin strip header to connect external LED strips. Power delivery is handled by four phases dedicated to the CPU and a well-fitted heatsink that takes care of cooling. Support for high-speed memory is an area where MSI offers its one-click A-XMP setting. Game Boost is another one-click setting that allows novice users to apply an overclocked preset at the click of a button.
It is worth highlighting that the B350 Tomahawk and B350 Tomahawk Arctic are both functionally identical except for their colour scheme and onboard LED colour. Read on to find out how the MSI B350 Tomahawk performs.
| MSI B350 Tomahawk | |
| Form Factor | ATX, 30.4 x 24.3 cm |
| CPU Socket | AMD AM4, 4+2 phase VRM |
| Chipset | AMD B350 |
| Memory | DDR4 Dual channel, 4 DIMMs, up to 64GB, up to 3200MHz+ with OC (with a Ryzen CPU) |
| Onboard Graphics |
VGA, DVI-D, and HDMI ports for use with AM4 APUs |
| Expansion Slots | 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16 for Ryzen, wired to the CPU), 1x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, wired to the chipset), 2x PCIe 2.0 x1 (wired to the chipset), 2x PCI |
| Storage | 4 x SATA 6Gbps (via B350 chipset) 1 x M.2 SATA (6Gbps) or NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 (with Ryzen CPUs) or PCIe 3.0 x2 (with AM4 APUs) |
| USB | 6 x USB 2.0 (4 Internal, 2 Rear, via B350) 7x USB 3.0 (4 Internal via B350, 3 Rear, via CPU) 1x USB 3.0 Type-C (1 Rear, via CPU) |
| Networking | 1 x Realtek 8111H Gigabit LAN |
| Audio | Realtek ALC892-based 7.1 channel HD audio |
| Fan Headers | 6, all support 3/4pin fans and DC/PWM mode |
| RGB Headers | 1, 4-pin RGB |
| Rear I/O | 1 x PS/2 mouse & keyboard combo port 2 x USB 2.0 ports 1 x VGA 1 x HDMI 1 x DVI-D 3x USB 3.0 Type-A port 1x USB 3.0 Type-C port 1 x LAN (RJ45) port 6x OFC audio jacks |
| UEFI BIOS |
MSI Click BIOS 5 UEFI |
Thanks!
Hey Kitguru did you run into any issues with main board thermal sensor during your testing or rather do you know what the main board thermal sensor is actually measuring because I’m running the main board with a r5 1600 at 4ghz 1.4v and Main board sensor is reporting 98°C after 15min of prime95. Which seems stupidly hot given that I’ve got 4Nidec Servo GentleTyphoon 120 mm 2150 RPM fan’s in the case. I kinda just wanna know first of all if that thing is the VRM sensor or “chipset” because which ever one it is guess I’ll add to the custom loop. Because 98°C during stress test just doesn’t sit well with me.
“MSI’s RGB lighting control tool is sub-par on the Tomahawk SKU as MSI is clearly trying to push RGB aficionados towards ‘Gaming’ branded models.”
What kills me about this is that you can only “push me” into a higher priced model IF YOU TELL ME about the shortcomings of the cheaper model! Granted, this many fan headers and an LED header on a $90 board were all a major win but come on. If MSI made it clear I’d only have 7 colors I would have happily sprung the extra $25 for a better featured board. Instead, they called it “RBG” and make mentions of Mystic Light and its16.8 million colors on the product page. Not only misleading, but they fouled up the whole strategy of driving me to a more expensive board.
I know they fixed a few of the Tomahawk’s issues with the PLUS model, which has no legacy PCI slots and more colors than just red for the on-board LEDs. I wonder if they made the LED header full RGB, too. Hard to find an answer on this.