The MSI B450 Tomahawk Motherboard Review: More Missile Than Axe
by Gavin Bonshor on December 11, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- MSI
- Zen
- AM4
- Ryzen
- Tomahawk
- Ryzen 2
- B450
- Entry Level
- MSI B450 Tomahawk
Gaming Performance
Ashes of the Singularity
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
Thief
Thief has been a long-standing title in PC gamers hearts since the introduction of the very first iteration which was released back in 1998 (Thief: The Dark Project). Thief as it is simply known rebooted the long-standing series and renowned publisher Square Enix took over the task from where Eidos Interactive left off back in 2004. The game itself utilises the fluid Unreal Engine 3 engine and is known for optimised and improved destructible environments, large crowd simulation and soft body dynamics.
Total War: WARHAMMER
Not only is the Total War franchise one of the most popular real-time tactical strategy titles of all time, but Sega delve into multiple worlds such as the Roman Empire, Napoleonic era and even Attila the Hun, but more recently they nosedived into the world of Games Workshop via the WARHAMMER series. Developers Creative Assembly have used their latest RTS battle title with the much talked about DirectX 12 API so that this title can benefit from all the associated features that comes with it. The game itself is very CPU intensive and is capable of pushing any top end system to their limits.
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FoRealz - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
I have two questions:1. Why are b/x/h 400 boards performing worse than their predecessors?
2. Why are ps/2 ports making a comeback?
I'm currently on an Asus z270 tuf mark 1 and my board has so much more than the newer tuf boards. (2 lans, etc) I'm really confused as to why boards have been going downhill nomatter Intel or AMD.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - link
I don't understand PS/2 ports on new motherboards at this point. There aren't a lot of interface devices out there that have survived and I don't see indications that production of PS/2 keyboards and mice are still going. Legacy-free and/or using that IO cluster space for something else might be useful.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
It's because of the eSports idiots who still believe that USB is inferior because it polls.gavbon - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
That makes more sense - eSports, euuurgh!bananaforscale - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Well, it *is*, but you're not going to notice the difference. :P And if there's something at a higher priority than the USB driver, well...kn00tcn - Sunday, December 16, 2018 - link
that's just false, you just want an excuse to to act elitistthere is another anand article that explains why, figure it out if you're not an idiot
plonk420 - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
it's OCing and gaming... USB sometimes has fits with certain types of OCing (BCLK, i think? i don't OC almost ever). also IIRC from a recent Carmack talk, PS/2 interrupts the OS to give its input, whereas USB input enters queues and buffers before being processedgavbon - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
1. It could be driver/chipset driver related; we have also just had a change in our test suite/driver going forward for 2019.2. That's a hard one to answer. Budget boards tend to have them as well as overclocking focused motherboards more than premium models. It could be that they don't expect all budget users to have adopted USB yet? It's an interesting question though...
kn00tcn - Sunday, December 16, 2018 - link
if you're gavin, how did you forget ian's article for win7? https://www.anandtech.com/show/11182/how-to-get-ry...ps/2 is for win7, not budget
kn00tcn - Sunday, December 16, 2018 - link
'every' [citation needed] am4 mobo has ps/2, did you forget it supports win7? you cant even run the installation without usb drivers or ps/2 inputintel doesnt even provide win7 drivers, so nobody needs ps/2