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MSI could have done better with the Tomahawk without increasing production costs, likely reducing them in fact, with only minor changes. I didn't really detail it too much but I would have made a second non WIFI SKU Tomahawk that had the following;
On further investigation neither Nahimic 2.5+ or Nahimic 3 will function on the X570 Tomahawk meaning MSI haven’t paid a license fee to Nahimic for the Tomahawk, if you are a gamer who bought the Tomahawk and expected the Nahimic suit to be included I’d imagine you are feeling pretty miffed right about now getting this confirmation, and with good reason considering the price of the Tomahawk and the already cut down audio implementation. Perhaps in-use testing rather than a pure hardware analysis will reveal something that is not yet apparent. 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. Lightning Fast Game experience: PCIe 4.0, Lightning Gen4 x4M.2 with M.2 Shield Frozr, StoreMI, AMD Turbo USB 3.2Gen 2 The worst issue though was with memory I used several different kits on the board all using different ICs including Samsung B-Die, Micron E-Die, Hynix DJR, and Hynix MFR. The B-Die kit seemed ok but all of the Hynix and Micron kits had varying degrees of success the Micron kit particularly did not want to work on the Tomahawk one set of DIMM banks the board outright refused to POST and the other set of DIMM banks the most I could coax out of the kit was 2933MHz and that was the kit of Crucial Ballistix I reviewed so know full well the kit is capable of at least 3333MHz. The kit I ended up using for this review is the Klevv BoltX[/u] which as it turns out is on the Tomahawks QVL list for 3000 and 5000 series CPUs while very similar kits from Klevv are on the memory QVL for the 2000 series CPUs. Even with this kit however the Tomahawk still would not POST at some frequencies without the XMP profile being enabled which is quite unusual, the board really doesn’t have a clue on how to set memory timings when left to its own devices. Don’t be fooled by the memory QVL list for the 2000 series CPUs for the Tomahawk at a glance it looks impressive but on slightly closer inspection you will notice the vast, vast, VAST majority are Samsung B-Die kits, not Hynix or Micron. Other manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte are doing far better on their QVLs for 2000 series CPUs when it comes to actual tested IC variety which is far more important than number of tested brands all using the same ICs.Glad you like the review, I always appreciate other viewpoints I'm not one of these delicate flowers that gets all emotional but there were specific reasons for my conclusions beyond the details I went into so I'll list them now; Right, to the RMAA results the first two charts are for people less experienced with audio to show more clearly what is considered good and bad the Xonar will go first;
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 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. 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. Moving past the Asus and Gigabyte boards, perhaps most important of all is the 63 degree drop in PCB temperature from the horrible Gaming Edge WiFi.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.
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