Motherboard Performance
Testing the MSI MAG X870E TOMAHAWK MAX WiFi PZ was accomplished using the benchmarks below. The following components were used: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB at 6000MT/s (CMH32G5M2D6000C36), MSI Spatium M580 Gen5 NVME, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card. Comparison results are discussed from the recent review of the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS ELITE X3D as that board is equally outfitted. Below you will find a gallery of result screenshots from our testing protocol and a brief discussion of the results.
As we did in the review of the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS ELITE X3D, we have also included a number of gaming benchmarks meant to test the X3D Gaming Mode selection in the BIOS. The refresh of the X870E motherboards has brought in an updated version of the X3D Gaming Mode, with claims by MSI of a 2 to 20% performance boost at 1080p when enabled and under the proper circumstances. We have taken that to task, as you will see.
In our synthetic benchmarks, across nearly the entire test suite, the MSI MAG X870E TOMAHAWK MAX WiFi PZ performed identically to the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS ELITE X3D.
In CrystalDisk, we see full Gen5 performance in M.2_1 and_2 if in the BIOS we disable USB4. If not, the performance is halved for M.2_2. AIDA64 performance is identical. Blender, CinebenchR23, GeekBench6, VRay and 3DMark CPU Profile are all within margins. In TimeSpy, we ran both BIOS default and PBO+X3D Gaming Mode enabled and saw results very similar to what we recorded from the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS ELITE X3D in default and X3D Turbo Mode 2 Extreme Gaming.
VRM Temperature
The temperature testing consists of multicore Cinebench R23 for a minimum of 20 minutes. HWInfo64 was used to monitor the MOS and CPU VRM temperatures. Here we see the CPU at 88C with the clocks reaching 5650MHz. Temperatures reached between 55 and 65C maximum. This has been characteristic of all three Project Zero motherboards. There was no issue completing any benchmark and no thermal throttling.