MSI B450 Tomahawk review - Introduction

MSI B450 Tomahawk
A value offering from the MSI arsenal series B450 motherboards

We review the MSI B450 Tomahawk, based on the new B450 chipset it is aimed at for Ryzen processors, and in specific the new Ryzen 2000 / Zen+. The new B450 series chipset based board offer some more appealing value, as budget wise this board sells at a sub 109,- USD/EUR price point. It is a lovely looking value alternative and hey, there's very little LED bling as also.

Yeah, Zen+ was launched in April, aka Ryzen 2000 or 12nm optimized Ryzen processors, the 'refresh' SKUs so to say. The new 12nm Zen+ processors will work fine with your X370 chipset based motherboard and vice versa, however, AMD launched the X470 chipset alongside these new Zen+ processors. The new chipset offers small improvements in combo with the new 12nm products. For example, to better facilitate XFR2 options. It has been a year already ever since AMD launched the first generation Ryzen processors. It had a bit of a rocky launch with the inter-core latency discussion a 1080p gaming performance as well as memory support. But the tide definitely turned for AMD as more and more people are considering to purchase an AMD processor-based PC, for their next purchase. The memory compatibility issues are mostly all gone, of course, we'll look at game performance in this article as well. But yes, things are looking good. The new 12nm processor generation can be clocked a notch higher. The upper range frequencies at 4.2~4.3 now are feasible, that also means that on the lower end of the spectrum, AMD is now capable to increase base-clock performance ion the more high-end parts. All these little tweaks bring the benefit of an overall faster processor series. Add to that improved memory latency and improved XFR2 ranges and you'll notice that the new ZEN+ generation now has become a really viable and more competitive product. So the ones that have not made a move towards AMD Ryzen just yet, now potentially could or will.  

What you're going to see on most motherboards is that they are mostly ATX form factor solutions that have been fitted with at least two PCIe x16 slots, but please do realize that's 16 lanes PCIe Gen3 for the first slot, the second gets four, the third and others even just one. The second and third slots are connected PCI Express 2.0, not 3.0. (chipset connection). This board comes with just one M.2 slot, but that is a full four PCIe lanes Gen3 connection. It has six SATA ports for the classic configuration. 

Today's tested motherboard, the MSI B450 Tomahawk, is obviously based on the B450 chipset and thus its feature set. This more value series board includes support for one M.2-NVMe SSDs, USB 3.1. The primary PCIe slot is metal reinforced to withstand the weight of high-end cards. This board is NOT SLI or Crossfire compatible. The audio features a Realtek ALC 892 codec. The motherboard is reasonable in its features but certainly will look nice on any DIY PC build. The dark styled PCB has very few LED accents, basically, only the backside has some leds as halo effect. Combine this motherboard with any Ryzen 2000 series four, six or eight-core processor and you'll be pleasantly surprised as to what it offers. Let’s start up the review, shall we?