The decision whether to opt for Z890 or B860 purely comes down to whether you need overclocking support and to a much lesser extent, whether you can find any B860 boards with specific premium features. This can sometimes be a problem as they tend to have a much lower upper price limit. Thunderbolt 4 certainly exists on B860 where it has been confined almost exclusively to pricier options in the past for example, but more modern audio codecs, larger heatsinks for M.2 SSD and VRMs and better power delivery are now relatively common on more expensive B860 options than they have been in the past.

When you keep adding features on cheaper boards, their cost can quickly approach that of Z890 options. The MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wi-Fi compared to its B860 sibling is a classic example. The B860, despite lacking overclocking and a few other features, costs only $10 less. This highlights the good value of the Z890 model we're reviewing today and explains why we chose to review it first. You get a better audio codec, more M.2 and Thunderbolt 4 ports, more fan headers and even more power phases. In short, you'd be mad to go for the B860 version. In part, the value here comes from price drops, undoubtedly thanks to Intel's Core Ultra CPUs having such poor sales and a resulting similar situation for LGA1851 motherboards. Wherever you look, most received discounts usually within a matter of weeks of Arrow Lake's launch late last year.

Combined with a plethora of performance updates and slightly lower prices, we don't doubt that some blue team fans may have been waiting for January after Intel's promised performance updates for Arrow Lake before buying in to LGA1851. However, these haven't amounted to a turnaround in its fortunes, but still, for this platform, from most angles, the MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wi-Fi seems to be a great option. Anything much cheaper starts cutting features at a rapid rate, but we think MSI has found a good balance. Cooling for SSDs is excellent except for the upper heatsink, which struggles to deal with current generation PCIe Gen 5 SSDs under sustained workloads. However, we'd probably suggest using an aftermarket M.2 heatsink if you're going to be hammering one of these anyway. The VRMs too seemed to be more than adequate for coping with our Core Ultra 9 285K, at least at default settings, with plenty of headroom for opening the taps and overclocking. You also get uprated power output on the Type-C front panel header to fast-charge your smartphone, and the I/O panel includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports.

There are plenty of USB ports in general as well as fan headers, which are well-placed and again, have uprated power on some of them, which you won't find on cheaper boards. You might not have use for them now, but Wi-Fi 7 and 5 Gbps Ethernet will likely be useful tools in the future too—within the lifespan of this board—and these are often trimmed from cheaper alternatives. We think the board looks great too, certainly better-looking than examples we saw hovering around the $200 mark in both Z890 and B860 camps.

MSI has sensibly held back in key areas though, to keep the price as low as possible without making the MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wi-Fi fall into the bargain bin in terms of aesthetics or features. There are no power or reset buttons, no thermistor header for thermal probes, not all the M.2 heatsinks are tool-free or have underside cooling, there's no onboard RGB lighting and fewer VRM power phases too. None of that really matters, though, if all you want is to apply a simple overclock to get a little more out of your Core Ultra processor and don't want to pay more for extras you won't use or don't need. This is usually something the Tomahawk boards do well and its no exception here. If you've made the decision to go with Intel this time around and want an affordable, overclockable motherboard, the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wi-Fi ticks practically every box.