MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi Review

The MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi has been on the market for 12 months and was one of the first motherboards to be launched alongside the Intel Core Ultra 200S desktop processors, also known as Arrow Lake, in October 2024. At the time, there were few other models to choose from, but over the months things have changed significantly and MSI faces stiff competition at this price point.

The Z890 Tomahawk’s original MSRP was $300, though you’re more likely to find it around $260, and while it’s not a huge discount, it’s more in line with ASRock and Gigabyte boards. That’s not the only thing that has changed since last year, as Arrow Lake’s performance has noticeably improved thanks to a wealth of microcode, BIOS, and Windows updates. However, in gaming, the Core Ultra 200S still lags behind the AMD Ryzen 9000 series.

The MSI Tomahawk series of motherboards has been available on the market since 2018, as part of the budget and mainstream products, bearing the MAG (MSI Arsenal Gaming) moniker. The Z890 Tomahawk WiFi sits at the top of the MAG stack, partly due to price, but primarily due to the comprehensive range of features it has.

This is because, as its name suggests, Tomahawk uses the Intel Z890 chipset, which provides the most PCIe lanes for expansion slots, storage options, and USB ports of any 800 series. The motherboard has three PCIe slots: one x16 Gen 5, connected directly to the processor, and two x4 Gen 4 through the Z890 chipset.

Next to them there are four M.2 slots for SSD drives. The processor controls two of them, with the primary socket being Gen 5 and the other being Gen 4; the other two are Gen 4 processors and controlled by the chipset. One of the best aspects of Arrow Lake and the Z890 is the fact that there are enough PCIe lanes to allow for all of the above to be populated while still maintaining full performance.

The same goes for all Thunderbolt and USB ports on the rear I/O panel. You get the first two, and considering they support up to 40Gbps in Thunderbolt 4 mode, 20Gbps in USB4 mode, or 10Gbps when operating as USB 3.2 Type-C ports, as well as providing DisplayPort 2.1 outputs, you get a ton of options just with these.

As for the remaining USB ports, there are four 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports (three Type A, one Type C) and another four 5 Gbps USB 3.0 ports. Surprisingly, there are no USB 2.0 ports on the rear I/O panel, but I guess no one can complain about having a total of ten peripheral slots since that’s the going rate at this price point.

Similarly, a host of user-friendly features on the motherboard are welcome. Two of the M.2 heatsinks and the main PCIe graphics card slot are equipped with quick-release mechanisms, buttons for clearing and flashing the BIOS, debug LEDs and a display to indicate what’s happening during the boot process, and a Wi-Fi antenna that simply slides into the slots. Even UEFI is clear and basic to operate.

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So far so good. In fact, if you’re only interested in storage, expansion, and peripheral support, you might as well stop reading and just buy one. Before you do that, though, it’s worth noting that the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk doesn’t stand out everyone area.

Testbed for PC gamers
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 AIO | ARIES: 32GB Lexar Thor OC DDR5-6000 | Graphics Processor: Zotac GeForce RTX 4070 | Storage: 2TB Corsair MP700 | Charger: Thermaltake ToughPower PF3 1050 W | Operating system: Windows 11 25H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Acer XB280HK

Considering that the above motherboards in the gaming benchmark results have been tested for a long time, some of the discrepancies will be due to differences in BIOS, microcode and Windows. However, the fact that the MSI board is noticeably slower in our Factorio test has been a problem since launch. It’s better than it was, but there’s no obvious reason why it should lag so far behind other motherboards.

That said, overall gaming performance isn’t up to par bad; it’s just very average compared to other boards. Some are better, some worse. This is almost certainly not helped by the specifics of Arrow Lake, as the MSI X870 Tomahawk board for AMD processors performs as well as any other X870 board.

The same is true for CPU-intensive content creation and benchmarking. In all cases, the MSI Z890 Tomahawk lags behind other boards we tested, but not enough for it to be really noticeable in real-world situations. MSI may be using conservative RAM timings to raise stability, which goes some way to explaining the above results and, to a lesser extent, why it runs slower in Factorio.

You might be tempted to think that you can bypass all this by simply overclocking the Core Ultra 200S processor used on the motherboard. It’s certainly very basic because MSI’s UEFI has everything logically laid out and clearly labeled. However, with its default settings, the Z890 Tomahawk doesn’t start in the best position for overclocking.

As you can see, the Core Ultra 9 285K used in all of our LGA 1851 motherboard tests draws the most power during the Baldur’s Gate 3 benchmark on the MSI board. It’s not a huge margin, but when the Gigabyte already has 9 W more, overclocking will only make the situation worse. More power means more heat, and not just for the CPU, as VRMs will have a harder job.

While the ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite’s peak VRM temperature is almost certainly a manufacturing error, the fact that the Z890 Tomahawk runs hotter than the NZXT N7 Z890 and ASRock B860 Steel Legend doesn’t bode well for sedate overclocking. It doesn’t perform particularly well with a Gen 1 PCIe 5.0 SSD, although newer drivers run cooler, so if you’re going to go this route with your primary storage, you should consider one of the latest Gen 5 SSDs.

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If you’re looking for the best performance and thermals, regardless of budget, then the extremely costly Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero is untouchable. However, it is $220 more costly than the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi, which is almost twice as costly.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s the best Z890 motherboard on the market. If money is no object, Maximus easily wins, and where budget is essential, the ASRock B860 Steel Legend WiFi can be purchased for just $160 at Amazon. However, the latter does not support Wi-Fi 7 and has fewer Thunderbolt and USB ports than the MSI model.

All things considered, the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi stands out as a solid proposition: it offers connectivity and expansion options that wouldn’t look out of place on a high-end motherboard, and yet comes at a competitive, popular price point. Unfortunately you don’t get the best performance, but it’s not so sluggish that you have cause for concern.

If I reviewed this motherboard in October 2024, the conclusion wouldn’t be as positive, but sometimes it really pays to be behind schedule to the party.