MSI B450 motherboards

Vejnemojnen · January 26, 2020

Just out of curiosity. Why people keep recommending the B450 Tomahawk MAX, WITHOUT MENTIONING two capable options, which are both usually cheaper?

I'm referring to the A-Pro MAX and Gaming Plus MAX boards (as well as Mortar MAX)

I am aware, that, the most beefy and efficient VRM heatsink is on the Tomahawk. But, all of these boards are capable enough, to handle a six-eight core CPU with OC ( refer to this table and also this tier list and the tier list on LTT boards.

I know prices vary significantly between regions, but, in my country, the Tomahawk MAX is always closer to 38k HUF (~115euros), whereas the A-pro was mostly 30k (~90 euros) and Gaming Plus started from 32-33k HUF (95-100Eur)

Right now, everything became more expensive for some reason though. I know, that the Tomahawk MAX is the MOST POPULAR and WIDELY RECOMMENDED B450 Board, BUT I find it weird, that the other two excellent B450 ATX boards (Gaming Plus MAX and A-Pro MAX) hardly gets a mention on this forum. Whereas these boards are very popular locally, mostly due to their price-to-performance ratio& friendly BIOS-es.

What makes Tomahawk that superior? As far as I am aware of, all three boards perform very similarly, and, the price differences don't reflect this. Any input& opinions are welcome! For me, the Tomahawk is NOT the clear winner of comparisons. : )

Jurrunio · January 26, 2020

Feature set I guess, also Gaming Plus breaks color schemes while A-Pro has ZERO RGB support unless you add controllers to it.

lafrente · January 28, 2020

Hello there, yes, you are right. Once an idea starts spreading its like a snowball tumbling down a snowy mountain. Gaming Plus Max and Tomahawk Max specs, vrms etc are literally the same. Because of that snowball effect, the price difference doesn't justify the performance difference, which is literally zero.

There are two tiny differences though, to be honest.

First difference is the color scheme, Tomahawk has the "default" accent. Though on the Gaming Plus, the 2 ram sticks you're gonna install first will cover the red ram slots, GPU will cover the top PCI and shade the bottom one. So you actually won't see much of that red. (In my case I WANTED to see that red, but was disappointed when stuff covered most of it up.)

Other difference is, Tomahawk maybe has 0.0001cm3 bigger heatsink. (They might be actual same size, thats what I judge from the pics) Not the VRM's btw, they are same. I am talking about those metal chunks on the board spreading heat. And I doubt 0.0001cm3 of bigger metal will make a difference.

In my case, I got the Gaming Plus as they were pretty much same price and I was actually looking for a board with red accents to fit my case. And let me tell you, I absolutely love it. I've seen cpu hit 80c, gpu 80c, I haven't seen the motherboard past 50c, and I have hwinfo start auto as soon as I turn my pc on.