MSI B350 Tomahawk Review

Test Setup

We've revised our AM4 motherboard test setup since our first review given that we now recommend the Ryzen 7 1700 by far compared to the other two CPUs for the simple reason it costs less and is overclocking friendly. With a lack of AM4 adaptors in our lab at the moment plus some issues with some of our in-house all-in-one liquid-coolers and also concerns on their impact on XFR, especially if they started to fade in terms of performance, we've opted for Noctua's NH-U12S SE-AM4 air cooler, which is more than able to get our test CPU up to 4GHz. We've also dropped PCMark 8's video editing test from our lineup and included Handbrake instead, as it's more representative of the demands of a multi-threaded video encoding application.

• Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance 3,000MHz DDR4 RAM
  
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700
  
• GPU: XFX Radeon R9 390X DD 8GB
  
• PSU: Corsair RM850i
  
• SSD: Samsung 850Pro (SATA 6Gbps speed tests); Samsung 960 Evo 500GB (M.2 speed tests)
  
• CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4
  
• Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit

Thanks to AMD for supplying the CPU, XFX for the graphics card, Corsair for supplying the PSU, memory and CPU cooler, and to Samsung for the SSDs.

Tests:

Content creation
• Cinebench R15
  
• PCMark 8 Photo Editing
  
• HandBrake video encoding
  
• Terragen 4
  
  Gaming
  
• 3DMark Time Spy (CPU Test)
  
  SATA 6Gbps and M.2 Storage
  
• CrystalDiskMark
  
  Audio
  
• Rightmark Audio Analyzer
  
  Power
  
• Power Consumption
  
  Overclocking and EFI
  
• Overclocking discussion and EFI