MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II Motherboard Review - Leveling up

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

AMD's AM5 socket keeps on keeping on, and 800 series motherboards are not going anywhere anytime soon. MSI's MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II is not the second B850 Tomahawk as the name might suggest. It's actually the third, following the original B850 Tomahawk and the B850 Tomahawk Max.

MSI's Tomahawk motherboards usually come to the attention of budget-conscious buyers. They appeal with solid feature sets, good cooling, and subtle designs. I generalize them as no-frills, no-fuss options for users who want a reliable board that's a clear step up in quality and features over entry-level models, while priced below mid-range models. Let's see if the B850 Tomahawk Max II follows suit.

The B850 Tomahawk Max II supports AMD AM5 Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 series CPUs. As it is a new release, it supports CPUs including the Ryzen 9 9850X3D out of the box. It supports up to 256GB of memory and features a 14+2+1-phase VRM with attractive heatsinks. It comes with 5G LAN, 320MHz WiFi 7, a 64MB BIOS ROM, and it incorporates EZ-DIY features. Also present is an external clock generator for CPU base clock overclocking. Sadly, though, USB4 is absent.

The MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II is available for $269, which, in isolation, is a good price; however, a check at Newegg shows the B850 Tomahawk Max selling for $209, which is very appealing. The original Max misses out on the 64MB BIOS ROM and the OC engine. Of those two features, the former may prove critical in the years ahead, while the latter will appeal only to a small number of buyers. In time, the Max II will surely decrease in price, though.

Best Deals: MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II Motherboard

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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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The B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II comes in a compact box. The only real feature highlighted is the 64MB BIOS. It's also AI-ready. Aren't they all?

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In contrast to the front of the box, the rear shows a comprehensive rundown of the board's key features and specifications, along with a view of the rear I/O.

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The board comes with an atypical set of accessories consisting of a Wi-Fi antenna, two SATA cables, a quick start guide, stickers, M.2 accessories, and regulatory notices. The final cable, called the EZConn cable, connects to the JAF_2 header on the motherboard. It combines a system fan, a 5V ARGB header, and a front USB 2.0 header into one, making it a good way to eliminate some case cable spaghetti.

Motherboard Overview

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MSI has tweaked the Max II's design. It's removed some of the polarizing green and yellow highlights, opting instead for a more neutral, mostly black theme. I think MSI tends to go a bit overboard with its dragon logo, which is missing from this board. Overall, I think it is the best-looking of the 800-series Tomahawks, though personally, I was not averse to the green splashes.

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The board itself doesn't have any built-in RGB, but there are three ARGB headers and a 12V RGB header for lighting strips. There are eight 4-pin fan headers, which is an impressive number.

In the old days, overclockers were highly appreciative of budget overclocking boards. Immediately adjacent to the bottom PCIe slot are a pair of jumpers that directly adjust the CPU's base clock in real time. You'll need to supply your own 2-pin switches, though. I'm a little surprised MSI didn't opt for two small buttons instead of jumpers. This feature will be useful for owners of 7000 series X3D chips, which are multiplier-locked. You can also control the base clock via the BIOS.

The front USB complement comprises a single Type-C 20Gbps port, four Type-A 5Gbps ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. The 20Gbps port is the fastest available on the board.

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Four DIMM slots support DDR5-8400+ speeds with a capacity of up to 256GB. Interestingly, MSI states that Ryzen 9000 series processors support this speed. Often, they are rated lower than 8000 series chips. As has been the case since AMD introduced the AM5 platform, it recommends memory in the DDR5-6000 to DDR5-6400 range. Running faster memory means halving the memory controller speed, which adds latency.

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The B850 Tomahawk Max II features a 14+2+1 (VCore, SoC, Misc) phase VRM with 80A stages. It's enough to handle a Ryzen 9 9950X with PBO enabled, and it will surely handle the upcoming 9950X3D2 with its higher TDP.

The brushed-metal heatsinks have ample surface area and deep grooves. The metal plate atop the main heatsink looks classy, too. A 10-minute Cinebench R24 loop yielded a peak VRM temperature of 57 degrees Celsius, which is lower than some much more expensive boards.

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The board has four M.2 slots mounted on the PCB, two of which support PCIe 5.0 x4 drives. The other two support PCIe 4.0. The M2_3 slot only supports x2 speeds. It shares bandwidth with the bottom-most PCIe 4.0 (PCI_E3) slot. You can switch this slot to x4 in the BIOS, but this will disable the M2_3 slot. I think this is a fair compromise for a B850 board. You can still run a full set of four M.2 SSDs and three expansion cards simultaneously, which is impressive. There are four SATA ports too.

The B850 Tomahawk Max II features three physical PCIe x16 slots. The primary slot supports PCIe 5.0 x16 electrically and is reinforced for heavy graphics cards. The second slot supports PCIe 3.0 x1 electrically. Three x16 slots ensure compatibility, but when one of them supports just PCIe 3.0 x1, an x16 physical slot seems a bit superfluous.

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The primary M.2 heatsink features a quick-release mechanism, but it lacks the surface area of some competing boards. The other heatsinks are attached with screws.

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The rear I/O of the board is well equipped, though some may find the lack of high-speed 20Gbps or 40Gbps USB ports a concern. The USB complement consists of four USB 2.0 ports, one 5Gbps port, and five 10Gbps ports. I don't mind seeing USB 2.0 ports, as they are useful for devices like keyboards, mice, and printers that don't need lots of bandwidth.

A BIOS flashback button is a near-essential feature for AM5 boards, especially given that B850 boards are certain to support another generation of CPUs, and perhaps one more after that. A CMOS clear button is placed next to it.

The board's networking capabilities are strong, consisting of a Realtek RTL8126VB 5G controller and a MediaTek MT7927 WiFi 7 controller, which supports 320MHz connections and up to 5.8Gbps of bandwidth.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC4080 codec drives these.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

I am impressed by the modern UEFI design and layout MSI introduced with its 800 series boards. It combines the simplicity of old-school BIOS layouts with a fresh design that's easy on the eye, with attractive fonts and contrast. The hardware monitoring page, in particular, is very well designed. The fan controls are highly customizable.

The EZ Mode page has almost every setting a user will need. All set-and-forget features, such as XMP, PBO, boot priority, and fan controls, can be accessed from this page.

MSI calls its motherboard software the MSI Center. I really like the way it lets you download modules instead of a whole suite of bloat you may never use. The Mystic Light RGB control and hardware monitoring apps are likely downloads, but there's also a bunch of AI-assisted (of course) modules for tasks such as diagnostics and performance, audio, and networking.

Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench 2024 is a reliable, widely used benchmark that measures both single and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates.

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The B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II scored 2,308 in the nT test and 141 in the 1T test. That's enough for it to take top spot in our list of tested boards.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user might consider a high-core-count CPU, such as the Ryzen 9 9950X. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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A result of 430 seconds is one of the faster results, even if a couple of seconds over a seven-minute test isn't all that significant.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where higher values indicate the task will take less time to complete.

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A 160.0 FPS result is decent and just fractionally behind the fastest boards.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's very sensitive to changes in memory speed and latency, and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A score of 228.49 BIPS is a mid-pack result for the Tomahawk.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has been an area where Intel traditionally held an advantage. Chiplet architectures inevitably add some latency compared to monolithic chips. The real-world benefits aren't that important, though.

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This result is a bit of an outlier. It's the slowest we've seen to date, though in percentage terms it's nothing to worry about.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs solely for leisure, but some of us have to work too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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The differences between the boards are not large in this test.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game.

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A score of 4,099 is decent, but this test can be influenced by random background SSD accesses, and a half-second here or there in loading times will not be noticed.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme has lost favor as a graphics benchmark to Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The differences between the boards are minor, with only a few hundred points separating them when measured by CPU score.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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It's no surprise that the motherboard makes little difference in graphically limited scenarios.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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The differences here are negligible in percentage terms.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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All the tested motherboards perform essentially identically, but the good minimum FPS result is enough to place the MSI at the top of the list by a whisker.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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A peak temperature of 57 degrees is a good result for the B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II. The board's large heatsinks and deep grooves help keep temperatures well in check.

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This result is certainly a result of the low surface area of the B850 Tomahawk Max II's primary M.2 heatsink. The 3DMark Storage test is not overly demanding, so you'll need good case airflow if you plan to frequently move multi-terabyte files around. An underside thermal pad would also be beneficial for double-sided drives. MSI can do better here.

Final Thoughts

MSI's Tomahawk motherboards usually rate well on these pages. They tend to offer rich feature sets with no frills at an affordable price. The MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi II is another solid Tomahawk entry.

The biggest problem for the Max II is the Max I. It's available for $209 compared to the $269 launch price for the Max II. However, it doesn't include an external clock generator or the 64MB BIOS ROM. If you care nothing for fine-tuning your overclock, or overclocking a multiplier-locked Ryzen 7000 X3D chip, then its benefits don't apply. The 64MB ROM is also nice to have, but it remains to be seen if that will end up a must-have, at least until Zen 6 CPUs arrive. In time, the Max II's price will surely drop, but $60 at the time of writing is a good chunk of money, especially in a tough economy beset with sky-high memory prices.

Price aside, the Max II is the preferred option. As a refresh board, there are certainly undocumented circuitry tweaks here and there. It's got a VRM that will happily run any Ryzen chip, including the 9950X3D2. You get 5G LAN, and 320MHz WiFi 7, four M.2 slots, and three PCIe slots, all of which can be run simultaneously with manageable compromises. There are plenty of USB ports, though there's just the one 20Gbps front port. Still, we're talking about a B850 board here. You'll need to spend more if you want the features of an X870 board, such as USB4.

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I've long been a fan of MSI's UEFI. It is easy to navigate, and it's easy on the eye. MSI's software has also come a long way. You can choose the modules you want to install without unnecessary bloat.

As long as you have adequate airflow to keep M.2 temperatures under control, the MSI MAG Tomahawk Max WiFi II is a capable motherboard with strong expansion and connectivity potential. It'll happily host high-end components - including Zen 6 CPUs. It's a particularly notable overclocking option that hearkens back to the days of affordable overclocking boards. It doesn't quite earn an award at this point in time due to Max I discounts, but assuming its price drops after stock levels stabilize, it will surely take its place among the best B850 motherboards.