So in terms of thermal performance the B550-A Pro should have a big advantage over those boards. These are the same MOSFETs used by the B450 Tomahawk and B550M Pro-VDH WiFi, there's just two more sets of them and each phase feeds into its own dedicated inductor. Each of the 10-phases is driven by an On Semi 4C029N FET on the high-side with an On Semi 4C024N Fet on the low-side. From the IR35201 controller MSI takes 5 signals, each of which is then doubled using an IR3598 phase doubler.
The B550-A Pro is a significant upgrade offering a 10-phase vcore VRM. Then the B550-A Pro comes in at $140 making it $30 more expensive than the B450 Tomahawk. The heatsink has also changed, but still looks quite good. The Pro-VDH essentially copies its VRM from the B450 Tomahawk, there's a slight difference in the controller revision used, but that shouldn't change anything.
The MSI B550M Pro-VDH WiFi costs $15 more than the B450 Tomahawk at $125 and you get PCI Express 4.0, front panel USB Type-C and Wi-Fi support. That's great and all, it's certainly nice to have the option of higher quality motherboards, but what we also wanted to learn is how do the more affordable MSI B550 boards compare to the much loved B450 Tomahawk? Therefore there's no comparing the B450 and B550 versions of the Tomahawk, they might share the same name but they're radically different in terms of quality. The 5-phase vcore sees each phase driven by a pair of ISL99360 60A powerstages into a pair of inductors, so that means there's ten 60A powerstages in total, just two less than that of the X570 Tomahawk. However, if we look at the VRM, this board is in a completely different league, too. Now, the latest B-series Tomahawk board, the B550 commands a $180 price tag and that's obviously a huge step up. We're still looking at a 4-phase vcore but this time upgraded to a pair of On Semi 4C029N FETs on the high side with a pair of On Semi 4C024N Fets on the low-side, though each phase still only feeds into a single inductor. The MSI B450 Tomahawk was slightly higher at $110, but you were getting a much better motherboard in terms of VRM performance. The original B350 Tomahawk started life at $100 and featured a very basic VRM, the 4-phase vcore used Niko PK616BA MOSFETs on the high-side with a pair of Niko PK632BA MOSFETs on the low-side with a single inductor per phase. Something we need to discuss before getting into the test results is pricing, and of course, the VRM configuration for each board.
On hand we have the MSI B350 Tomahawk, so we'll be adding that to the mix and it will be an excellent reference point for the B450 and B550 Tomahawk boards. We also realized we've never looked at any B350 boards since our formal VRM thermal testing began after the release of the B450 chipset.
We've already looked at how some of the more expensive B550 boards compare to the MSI B450 Tomahawk, so we thought it might be interesting and perhaps more relevant to see how the MSI B550M Pro-VDH Wi-Fi stacks up, as well as the B550-A Pro. While we have yet to completely wrap up that testing, so far we've been able to gather some pretty interesting results.
As a result, we can hopefully draw a line under this issue now, at least for MSI, and for anyone else we suggest you take a look at the latest available BIOS versions to check they include the latest AGESA microcode released by AMD at the end of May.Over the past week we've been testing the VRM on a number of entry-level AMD B550 motherboards such as the Gigabyte B550M DS3H, Asus Prime B550M-A, Asrock B550M Pro4, and the MSI B550M Pro-VDH Wi-Fi. However, after this, we were sitting happy at the desktop ready to get on with some benchmarking. The only small snag is that while it was usually a case of just applying the A-XMP profile, we also needed to bump the DDR voltage up to 1.38V from the default 1.35V. It's important to cut to the chase here given our opening statement, and we're happy to report that while we struggled to get above 2,666MHz a week ago, not only can the board run happily at 3,200MHz using our Geil Evo X Samsung b-die kit but also at the usual 2,933MHz using our 3,000MHz Corsair LPX kit, which is Hynix-based and can have issues with AM4 boards compatibility-wise. Today, we've put MSI's B350 Tomahawk through its paces with the latest 1.63 BIOS version that sports the latest AGESA 1006 tweaks, which were released by AMD to address this problem specifically. The last few weeks have admittedly seen us grapple with a few issues on some cheaper Ryzen motherboards in getting to 3,000MHz with popular memory kits, but we're now seeing a major improvement in regards to memory compatibility. MSI B350 Tomahawk Review Manufacturer: MSI