AMD recently launched the B450 chipset for their new Ryzen 2 CPUs which gives us a nice
option under the X470 motherboards.
For my first B450 board we’ll be taking a look at the MSI Tomahawk and seeing what
features it’s got to offer.
The ATX board has a nice clean black and grey metallic colour scheme, nothing flashy going
on here.
There is some RGB lighting toward the top right hand side, and this can be controlled
using MSI’s light sync software.
In total there are about 10 different built in effects, but you can always turn it off
if you don’t like it.
Starting with the IO from left to right there’s a BIOS flashback button, your classic PS/2
port, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, DVI-D and HDMI 1.4 outputs which are only usable if
you’re using an APU with Vega graphics, two USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports, gigabit ethernet
port, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A and Type-C ports, followed by the audio ports using Realtek
ALC892.
There’s also this black and white IO shield included.
At the center of the board is the AM4 socket, which supports both AMD’s new Ryzen 2 CPUs
but is also compatible with the first generation too, and for my testing I’m using the Ryzen
7 2700 CPU with the stock cooler.
Next to the socket are the four memory slots which run in dual channel, and can support
up to 64GB of memory at DDR4-2666 speeds.
In my system I’m just running 2 8gb sticks as it’s what I’ve got available, and with
overclocking you can run up to DDR4-3466.
I’ve heard that with the second generation of Ryzen memory support has improved, so compared
to say B350 you should have better luck with memory overclocking, but as mentioned I don’t
have any exciting memory so wasn’t able to test that out.
As for the PCIe slots from the top down there’s a PCIe 3.0 slot with x16 speed, although if
you’re using Vega graphics from an APU you’re looking at x8 speed, and this top slot is
also reinforced with metal.
The rest of the slots are all PCIe 2.0, and we’ve got three x1 slots and another x16
slot although it’s only wired for x4 speed, giving us support for two way crossfire, no
mention of SLI though.
Just above the PCIe slots is the single M.2 slot, which is another change from the B350
version which had it covered by a graphics card in the top PCIe slot.
It uses 4 lanes of PCIe 3 and supports drives of these lengths.
It’s important to note that if you use this M.2 slot then the two SATA connectors on the
right will not be usable.
Along the top there’s an 8 pin power connector, CPU fan and RGB header.
Along the right hand side there’s 4 SATA 3 connectors, fan header, 24 pin power connector,
followed by another fan and pump header.
Finally along the bottom there’s the front panel audio, second RGB header, another fan
header, TPM connector, two USB 2.0 connectors followed by a single USB 3 connector, the
B350 model did have two of these so not sure why they needed to step down to one, and then
two more SATA 3 connectors for a total of 6.
Using the SATA ports there’s support for RAID 0, 1 and 10, and you can also use AMD’s
StoreMI with the board, which basically uses an SSD to cache frequently accessed items
from a hard drive, resulting in faster overall performance.
Finally for the last of the I/O there’s also a 6th fan header just above the M.2 slot.
To boot into the BIOS simply press the delete key during boot.
I found it fairly easy to navigate through and make changes, and I had no issues while
updating to the latest version noted here which is what I was testing with, and that
basically sums up my experience with the board, everything just worked for me as expected
with no issues.
The BIOS can be upgraded easily by copying the update files onto a USB stick, plugging
in and pressing the BIOS flashback button on the back of the board, it just takes a
few minutes to complete.
This feature wasn’t present in the B350 model, and gives us the ability to easily
upgrade the board, which is really useful given the AM4 socket will be supported until
2020, so when new CPUs come out you won’t have any issues if you buy the board with
say 3rd generation Ryzen in the future.
With B450 you’ve got the option of overclocking too, in my testing I was able to easily get
my 2700 to 4GHz on all cores, I didn’t do in depth overclock testing though.
We’ve got 4+2 VRMs here and I wasn’t able to measure temperatures with Hardware Info
because there didn’t seem to be a temperature sensor for the VRM.
Here’s what the heatsink areas look like at idle using a thermal camera, around the
mid 20s, then with the overclock applied under stress test this area went up by 20 degrees
after an hour.
Steve at Hardware Unboxed did some pretty in depth VRM testing of this board and a number
of other B450 boards if you want more information, but he noted that it performed well compared
to the competition.
As for the pricing the MSI B450 Tomahawk motherboard is going for around $189 AUD here in Australia
at the time of recording, or $110 USD in the US for my international viewers, you can check
updated pricing in the description.
There are both cheaper and more expensive B450 boards, but overall I think this one
is offering pretty good value for the features and you should be fine running any Ryzen 2
CPU even while overclocked here.
It’s got decent features for the price and I think it’s got a nice clean look without
being too flashy.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like if you’re
excited about these new B450 boards becoming available recently.
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one.