RYZEN ready MSI B350 Tomahawk Socket AM4 Motherboard Photo

Over at CES some AMD motherboards have been spotted, in this item we'll talk about the more budget series B350 chipset based motherboards. The photo is a MSI B350 Tomahawk with AM4 socket.

AMD is to release X370, B350 and A320 chipsets that are compatible with the upcoming RYZEN based processors (previously named ZEN).

Socket AM4 evolves the PC infrastructure towards DDR4, NVMe M2 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 and sure, PCI Express 3.0 platform support. 

AMD B350  Chipset (Mainstream)

If it has a B in the naming schema, you should think mainstream and that B for Business. A more generalized chipset that offers full performance, yet less tweaking options and often less PCI-Express lanes available, the mainstream series. For B350 some specs already have leaked, next tot the 8x Gen 3 PCI-Express lanes, it'll add/hook another 6 Gen 2 lanes  through the chipset and will offer a wide varyity of USB connectivity.  This motherboard series will offer 2 channel DDR4 memory we assume up-to 2400 MHz.

MSI B350 Tomahawk

Now we arrive at the B350 photos.  The board shows its standard 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors and being the more affordable solution, offers a 4+2 phase VRM. You can see DDR4 DIMM slots and a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. 

The second PCIe 3.0 x16 slot is  in fact x4. Then there are  two legacy PCI and PCIe 3.0 x1. Nice to see is the addition on a 32 Gb/s M.2 slot and the four SATA 6 Gb/s ports. Other then that you see the usual's in the form of 8-channel HD audio, gigabit Ethernet, and display outputs that include HDMI, DVI, and D-Sub. The display connectors will not be active fro the 8-core RYZEN parts btw.

Check out the thumbnails.