Board Layout

Despite the attractive price, MSI still managed to create a good-looking board with large heatsinks for the VRMs and M.2 SSDs, although the top heatsink for the latter might be a tad small for comfortably handling PCIe Gen 5 SSDs. We'll see in our testing later on. The PCB is relatively busy too, the rear lacks any additional cooling using backplates, but that's probably expecting too much at this price.


With everything removed and a naked PCB staring at us, you get a good view of where all the ports and components are on the board and can see that only one M.2 port features thermal pads on the underside, but that tends to benefit PCIe Gen 5 SSDs the most anyway. If you need four SATA ports rather than two, which is what many are cutting down to, especially on AMD boards at the moment, then you're in luck here and both these and the Type-C front panel header are right-angled too for easier cable tidying. That front Type-C port is USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps and also offers 27 W fast charging power delivery so you can charge your smartphone a lot faster than your typical USB 3.0 port.


The JAF_2 connector is for the included EZ Conn-Cable, which is the more advanced of MSI's EZ Conn-connector ports in that it combines 12 V ARGB, 4-pin fan and a USB 2.0 front panel connector into a single port. These can be used with any standard connectors of those types and not just MSI coolers thanks to the included splitter cable, which connects to the port and splits into 3-pin RGB, 4-pin fan and USB 2.0 header connectors. The fan control and lighting software as well as the BIOS report the port as being EZ-Conn. We can also see the EZ PCIe Release button too, which is simple to use and less haphazard than the ASUS Q-Release mechanism that requires you to yank the card up from one end. Further up the PCB we have an LED POST code display and a trio of fan headers, so if you have multiple fans and a pump to power in the roof of your case, there are plenty of ports here to connect them, unlike some of Gigabyte's similarly-priced boards.


If those weren't enough, then there's a fourth to the left of the top VRM heatsink, which is easy to forget about since the two 8-pin CPU power connectors are on the other side of the PCB. But if you need a fourth fan header at the top of the PCB then there is one, which combined with another in the middle of the board below the I/O panel, should mean that powering a rear case fan will be easy.


The power offered by the fan headers is decent too. Not so much on the system fan headers, but the pump header offers up to 3 A/36 W while the CPU fan header offers more than most at 2 A/24 W.


The heatsinks come in three parts and are all totally different. The top heatsink, which cools the only PCIe Gen 5 M.2 port, is the thickest of the three, but relatively small. The port has the advantage of cooling both sides of the SSD too and the heatsink itself is tool-free with a small sprung latch on one end to release it, with the other end using notches to align with pins on the port to secure itself.


Below it is a larger but thinner heatsink dealing with a single PCIe Gen 4 M.2 port. This sadly isn't tool-free. Finally, the lower heatsink stretched right the way across the board and cools both PCIe Gen 4 M.2 ports below. You could feasibly use any of these M.2 ports as there's no lane stealing going on here so we'll be testing all of them later on to see where you should place your SSDs for best cooling and whether the lone PCIe Gen 5 slot has the cooling to cope with hot Gen 5 drives.


The rear I/O panel is maybe a little lacking in Type-A USB ports with only seven available, with similarly-priced boards offering up to nine, but this should still be enough for most of us, especially as they're all USB 3.0 and above, with three offering USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps speeds. Instead, MSI has focussed on offering more Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, with two of these present as well as a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port. There's plenty of scope for using multiple displays if you don't want to go the discrete graphics route too, as in addition to two Thunderbolt 4 ports there's also a HDMI port. You also get USB BIOS Flashback and CMOS clear buttons, with the former being important given Intel plans several generations of CPUs to be compatible with LGA1851.

It made a bit of a mess with its 14th Gen CPUs in the past as many older boards lacked USB BIOS Flashback, but lacked out of the box support for Intel's somewhat unplanned 14th Gen CPUs. I'm glad to see that's not the case with the MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wi-Fi. Audio is provided by Realtek's ALC1220P codec, Wi-Fi 7 by Intel Killer BE1750x and 5 Gbps Ethernet by Intel Killer E5000. The Wi-Fi antenna is maybe not quite as lavish as Gigabyte's single-piece contraption, but MSI's EZ Antenna at least does away with the fiddly screw-on connectors, with simple push-on ones.