MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk WIFI DDR4 Motherboard Overview
Taking a first look at the MAG Z790 Tomahawk WIFI DDR4 we can see that MSI has gone with an all-black design which I think many people will appreciate. So you have an all black PCB with black accents and black heatsinks.
Starting at the CPU socket we have Intel’s LGA 1700 socket, which will support both 12th and 13th generation Intel core processors. Surrounding the CPU socket is of course of power delivery components. MSI is going with a 16+1+1 power phase design that has a mirrored power arrangement. For the power stages MSI is making us of the Renesas ISL99390’s which are 90A each. This will give your Vcore a total output of 1440A. The power delivery components are covered by two heatsinks and then you have the rear I/O cover that really brings the top part of the board together.
In the top corner of the board you’ll find two 8-pin EPS connectors. Then as we move across the top edge of the board there are two 4-pin fan headers and two 3-pin ARGB headers.
Moving over to the memory slots we have four DDR4 DIMM slots. This board supports up to 128GB of DDR4-5333 memory. Coming to the edge of the board we have a 4-pin fan header, 24-pin ATX power connection, a USB 3.2 gen 1 header, and a USB 3.2 gen 2 header.
As we come down the board there are six SATA 6GB/s ports which are at a 90-degree angle. At the bottom of the board you’ll find all of your headers and connections which include your HD audio headers, a 4-pin standard RGB header, 3-pin ARGB header, Thunderbolt header, three 4-pin fan headers, two USB 2.0 headers, another 4-pin fan header, TPM header, another SATA 6GB/s port, and your front panel headers.
The bottom half of the motherboard is of course characterized by heatsinks. Three of these are of course removable and reveal your M.2 slots. There are four Gen4 M.2 slots, the top slot gets its lanes from the CPU, while the other three get their lanes from the chipset. The M.2_3 slot is supports SATA M.2 drives. MSI is using their screwless locking system on the M.2 slots, which is definitely nice to see. All of the M.2 heatsinks have thermal tape on them.
As far as expansion slots go you have a single PCI-Express 5.0 x16 slot, a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot (x4 wired), and a PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slot. Moving around to the rear I/O we have a nice integrated I/O shield. As far as connections go we have DisplayPort, HDMI, Clear CMOS button, BIOS Flashback button, four USB 3.2 gen 1 Type-A ports, five USB 3.2 gen 2 ports (4 Type-A, 1 Type-C), 2.5G LAN, WIFI Antenna connections, and our audio connections.
