MSI B350 Tomahawk Review & Linux Test | Level One Techs

Looks good to me. :slight_smile:

Yep early biosses can be wonky.

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Some updates from side for anyone who cares.

VRMs: They are in fact a ton of crap. I was confused about some temps in HWMonitor (systin & cputin) reaching 120°C under load (Blender rendering) easily in less than 15 minutes on my 3.925Ghz / 1.375V CPU Voltage overclock.

Their quote: "Heavy plated gaming heatsinks - Leading heatsink design, for maximum cooling" should rather have some crevices instead looking nice. I'm considering to either mount some standard aluminium heatsinks on top using thermal compound glue or completely replacing MSIs heatsink (if anyone had a link to a fitting part I'd be very thankful).
EDIT: Yes, these values seem correct, I don't have a laser thermosensor but I put my finger there more than 5 minutes after my PC was off and you could still fry beef on that thing.

In the meantime I watched a presentation at AMD's where a tech dude explained to raise SoC to stabilize overclocking he wanted to demonstrate on an MSI board while he figured on the screen there is no such thing in the MSI BIOS, not even on the X370 boards. Hilarious.

Well I don't really mean to bash that hard on neither AMD nor MSI, I like AMD and I like my Ryzen, we definitely need them in today's price-war Intel is leading against its own customers. I also had a MSI GTX 970 which was a great card with great coolers, overall design much better than my Zotac 1080 AMP! (not to mention Zotac's unusable overclocking tool).

But I cannot understand AMD's marketing strategy of what it seems misinformation as well as MSI's tech strategy to feature buzz words over good tech (like the VRMs, BIOS and VRM-coolers).

BTW: The CPU NB is actually the north bridge voltage for PCIe. On the Tomahawk that voltage is by default around 0.920V, which repeatedly lead to greenscreen crashes on my system. Around 1V seems to be a good value and the chipset is at least not getting hot at all.

You have very nice silicon to sustain 4.0Ghz at less than 1.4 volts. I wonder how much more you could achieve with a proper mainboard, with a top rated PSU?
After my own hunt for a suitable mainboard, I came to the opinion that B350 4+2 phase VRM are not sufficient for overclocking over the long term. However, I'm dismayed at not only the fact that 120C should never happen even for a brief moment, but that this is occurring at such a low voltage! I hope you get a refund and try your chip on an X370.

Well, not really. Above 3.95 it get's really hungry and I've been unable to actually reach 3.75Ghz or more. Maybe cause of the board, maybe not.

I bought my whole upgrade at a new dealer I never tried before and never will again. So the refund is not gonna happen.

There was only one reason, why I chose the Tomahawk, it was at the time (and maybe still is) the only AM4 board featuring the good old PCI slots, which I need. I do have some piece of very expensive audio hardware that I want to continue to run.
If you don't need that PCI, go for a more expensive board, definitely go for ASUS.

On the other hand if you don't plan to render anything on 8 cores, just gaming and want a cheaper board you can go with the Tomahawk. In gaming the VRMs don't exceed 60° with my overclock.

BTW: MSI has pushed a new BIOS update, anyone keen on trying it out? I'm not, this is a productive system I need 12h / day for work, so I'm happy I reached stability atm.

So, this is not your 24/7 overclock?
Unless ASUS has really stepped up to the plate with EFI updates and other mainboard issues, I would avoid them like the plague. Also, my RMA with ASUS was a traumatic experience, they had no service after the sale.

There are actually more (German site, but filter still applies globally I guess :stuck_out_tongue: )

What are you referring to exactly? The frying issue with the VRMs? That's been solved weeks ago afaik.

ASUS had more problems reported upon launch than any other vendor over a multitude of issues.
Hopefully, they are caught up now with fixes.
Depending on where you live, you may not have many alternative manufacturers from which to choose unfortunately.

MSI seems to be using the same very cheap MosFET's in their VRM on all their Ryzen boards. The expensive boards just have more of those very cheap components. That they hit 120C is not surprising at all as they are pretty inefficient and when overclocking an 8-core they run hot. They are rated for 125C continous IIRC. I think buildzoid did a video on it lately.

Ah yes, here:

TLDR: MSI B350 board is not very good for overclocking, buy a better board if you want to overclock. I agree with buildzoid that it is disappointing seeing the same very cheap components on even MSI's top board.

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Yet MSI has been making some very good graphics cards which is why this is so surprising.
I expected much better.

Well that could also be verywell a false readout really.
Software isnt really an appropriate manner of measuring mosfet temperature.
Sensors can be wrong, or software can have readout bugs.
If you want to measure actual mosfet temps you have to use something like a thermal laser to determine the exact mosfet temperature.

Anyways, allthough the vrm implementations on the Msi boards arent that great, because of the cheaper mosfets.
However to be pretty honnest, if you want to overclock the max out of an R7 cpu, its just better to invest in a decent X370 board really.
i cannot say that enough.
Still wendell reached 3.9Ghz on the board without much of an issue if i remember correctlly.

But yeah if you want the best overclock experiance,
then people should simpley invest in a decent X370 board.
And then at this moment, Msi is probablly not the brand to look at.
But yeah i do researches on vrm implementations pretty much since the X58 era of motherboards.
And i kinda know what to expect from brands.

Do you think my suspicion of 4+2 VRM for high 24/7 overclocks(3900-4200Mhz) is justified?

Well basiclly if the mosfets / powerstages used for main vcore were IR3555 60A stages or similar.
Then a 4 phase vrm for main vcore would more then eduquate enough.
But thats of course not the case with these cheaper B350 boards.
Raw phase count doesnt really tell the whole story.
The story goes deeper then that.
Of course more true phase does matter in terms of ripple current reduction, for a cleaner power delivery, and better efficiency.
But thats a deep story for another time.

B350 boards in general arent really the greatest choice if you want high overclocks like 4.0GHz on R7 cpu´s 24/7.
For those kind of things,. people should really look at board like the Asus crosshair Vi hero, Asrock Taichi, Asrock professional gaming, Aorus Gaming K7.
But hey, of course B350 boards are cheaper for a reason.

I'll say this for this board... I'm running 3.8 comfortably, but it will not run stable for anything above that. The fact that I'm air cooling may have something to do with that, but 3.8 has been solid for me with 2933 ram. Cinebench of 1663 is more than good for me.

That said, I do agree that this board runs really warm, I've seen some really high temps during AIDA64 during load test but I think for my overclock it certainly serves its purpose. BTW, coming from a i5 2500k....this thing is impressive. It's immediately evident in lightroom where I do some photo editing.

Yeah that looks pretty reasonable for the Tomahawk board really.

What about the Gaming 5 or K5? Don't they use the same VRMs?

/edit found it (I probably should have asked there :slight_smile: )

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Yeah those boards have a great vrm aswell.
6+4 phase design no doubling on the main vcore.
And 40A IR3553 powerstages.

i posted the vrm specifications on the Aorus X370 Gaming 5 on wendells review topic on that board aswell.

edit: you found it allready haha :wink:

The reading is correct. Check the video Pholostan posted yesterday. That guy makes the calculation. Around 22 Watts of heat are generated at the VRM stage. The cooler design cannot dissipate that amount of heat.

After my finding yesterday I adjusted my case fans, I'm running the board inside a Mastercase Pro 5 maxed out with 5x 144mm fans and also have 2x CPU fans. So now the back and back top fans are basically in sync with the CPU coolers to get at least some cooling going on the VRMs. Noticeable but still too little effect on the VRM temp, while I pay for it with increased noise.

Well the board "only" cost around 120€, so I guess I'm gonna run it until it burns and buy a better one next year. Still a pity, if only I knew before, all those problems, all the time invested..

PCB Breakdown: MSI B350M Gaming Pro Youtube Video

I've also now flashed BIOS version 7A34v14 released two days ago. Gave me a minor heart attack cause afterwards I tried some higher mem frequency and was rewarded with nothing but a blank screen and a cursor at BIOS stage. After a reboot it worked again, but didn't really change anything for my DRAM compatibility. Still locked at 2667Mhz and still having the cold boot issue after the PC was unplugged for the night. So the first issue is due to me running 16GB - sticks, the later is a Ryzen bug not providing the adequate DRAM voltage directly at turn-on. Explained in the reddit I posted above. VRM related I guess, too. Also I didn't see a new option to either adjust SoC Voltage or provide DRAM boot Voltage. Well at least they tried, and have reacted pretty quickly, some respect for that.

I don't think so, those mosfet's will run hot under a load like that thanks to them not being very efficient. They need to dissipate quite some heat through that small heatsink. And IIRC they are rated to run at 125C continuous, so if they are cooled they'll survive. The capacitors right next to them will probably not be as happy though, as caps are usually not rated for that kind of temperature. More expensive Rubicon top out at 105C IIRC. Will it be a problem though? I don't know, but I wouldn't bee too worried. The mosfet's will be alright and caps usually have thousands of hours in their ratings, you need to run your CPU at high voltage for quite some time to get to those numbers. Get some airflow over the heatsink and call it a day.

There is a nice list of Ryzen motherboard VRM here (german):
https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/f12/am4-mainboard-vrm-liste-1155146.html

The cheapest MSI B350 board has three phases. All others seems to have four with one less high side mosfet except the Carbon that looks like it has doublers? All the X370 boards except the Titanium seems to use doublers too. Not sure how they do that if they all have that same controller, the RT8894A. The Titanium seems to be the only one that has an IR35201 controller (six phase).

Not that other makers B350 boards look fantastic, it is the lower tier after all.

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To leave some positive feedback after all: The Ryzen 7 is a low-cost beast when it comes to 3D rendering. Also Blender CPU rendering was highly optimized last year, my oc Ryzen beats my freaking GTX 1080 by around 10 minutes on a complex Cycles scene, wtf? :smiley:
Ryzen OC: 37min
GTX 1080: 45min
EDIT: Updated the numbers, read wrong. Still impressive!

So mileage will definitely vary depending on the scene, but considering how much cheaper it is to build a CPU network rendering node, rather than a GPU rendering node + the fact that I can completely use my system, even game while rendering on only 8 CPU threads + OSL only available on CPU + the much more RAM available on CPU rendering makes me want to push harder on the OC. I'm gonna measure the VRM cooler now and build some custom aluminium cooler which I will glue on top, just as an experiment.

EDIT2:
So 3 little Aluminium Heatsinks (ca. 15mm x 30mm x 20mm) + a bit of thermal glue dropped the VRM temps around 10°C, which doesn't sound that impressive at first, but the VRM temps are also rising a LOT slower now. In combination with the adjusted fans I'm now not exceeding 94°C on the VRMs on full load.

That's great cause not only I expect for the board to live much longer, but also gives me a few Mhz / Volts more headroom.

Success. Cost: 10 minutes of work, 15 minutes of walking to my engineer-dad and back to gather the parts. :smiley:

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