Reviews of MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK LGA 1700 DDR5 MOBO model highlight its strong performance and solid build quality.
Reviews of MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK LGA 1700 DDR5 MOBO model highlight its strong performance and solid build quality.
I understood the problems with other motherboard makers but didn’t know about burning non-X3D CPUs. ASUS made a big mistake, drawing media attention that helped competitors avoid the spotlight. Gamers Nexus recently shared a lengthy video challenging ASUS, which you should check out if you haven’t seen it yet.
It’s easy to judge a brand based on isolated problems, like Mercedes’ recall over wiring issues. Not every model is affected, and reviews from multiple sources give a clearer picture. I generally rely on Hardware Unboxed’s board evaluations. I tend to choose boards in the $200–$250 range but always check the reviews first. If I plan to stay on the site for a while—especially with platforms like AM4 or AM5—I prefer investing around $250 upfront rather than spending $130 on a cheaper option that might need replacing later. I recently bought the ASUS TUF B650 PLUS WIFI for my 7700x; it should handle my upcoming 9800X3D upgrade well. It was released in Norway for $210.
Yup, was already planning on watching it tonight. Weird, that one was more of a mid-tier board. It wasn't anything too special, but it didn't have a ton of issues I was aware of. What issues were you experiencing with it. Alright, that makes a bit ore sense. Yeah, you don't really figure out what you like and what you don't until around your 3rd system. I can go through and give you some of my opinions about different motherboards if you want, though admittedly it's a rather personal subject. The short version would be: MSI - They rarely make a complete crap motherboard, but they also rarely make something spectacular. Most are meh to good, little outside that range. BIOS is easy to learn but isn't that quick to navigate. ASUS - Expensive and unless you buy a top end board they have locked settings that you want for OC if you're doing that. Their boards are fine, but they have an "ASUS tax" that means with a few exceptions they're not a great value. Weirdly enough, their top end boards have quality assurance issues as of recently while their lower end boards are generally OK. Gigabyte - A fairly big swing where they've made some of the best motherboards I've used (X570 Master) and some of the worst motherboards I've used (GA-Z170-HD3P). Their BIOS is constantly changing and has a learning curve with every motherboard, but once you learn it it's pretty quick to navigate. ASRock - The biggest swing in board quality, where they make some boards that aren't worth the PCB material they use, and there's some boards where they are spectacular. More recently they've become a really good value even on the low end, though their BIOS has weird quirks that take getting used to. Granted, those are just tendencies of board vendors. As eluded to, all of them have made amazing boards, so you have to look at reviews to see which ones are the amazing boards and which aren't. Only thing that you really can judge purely based on the brand is the RMA department you'll be dealing with, and since most of them are equally bad (ASUS's does seem to be the worst though as of recently, at least in NA), it doesn't really matter which one you go with. It's a little complicated. VRM quality (the thing that can lower performance if its inadequately cooled) scales roughly linearly with price with a few outliers, so at the $200 mark all boards have roughly the same performance, and its just the feature set that differs. For reference, there's 4 different questions to keep in mind when buying a motherboard: Is the VRM good enough for the CPU I'm going to use? For a 12700, anything above $200 will be plenty, though there are quite a few cheaper boards that will be great as well like the B760M PG Riptide. You can check reviews to see what the VRM thermals look like. Does the board have the features I need? This is things like USB ports, SATA ports, M.2 slots, etc., as well as more obscure things like IOMMU support if you're doing GPU passthrough to VMs. Is the board free of issues that would affect me? This is things like known BIOS bugs or quality assurance issues, as well as design flaws/oversights and other general annoyances (I.E. mid-range Gigabyte boards used to include an automatic dual BIOS system, which if you were doing overclocking on those boards was very annoying to work with). These can only really be determined by reading through reviews. Can you stand the way the board looks? Basically, do you like the aesthetics, assuming you care about them in the first place? Your goal when picking a board is to find the cheapest option that answers "yes" to all those questions.
Thanks for the summary, Ronothan. I chose the MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK MAX because of its nice appearance and positive reviews. I also planned to upgrade with some future-proof components. Added a little GSkill RGB RAM since I love RGB and GSkill. This post will stay handy later. Thanks again!