MSI MAG B850 Gaming Plus MAX WIFI (AMD AM5)

MSI has been busy adding a refreshed group of motherboards to its Socket AM5 line of products, with the most common new feature being a 64 MB BIOS that paves the way for future features and CPU support. At $260, the MSI MAG B850 Gaming Plus Max Wi-Fi is one of the cheaper options, yet has an impressive set of features.

Overall the MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max Wi-Fi offers a reasonable feature set for the price, which minimizes PCIe lane sharing, offers PCIe Gen 5 for your graphics card and up to two M.2 SSDs, Wi-Fi 7, a decent EFI as well as capable VRM cooling that's ripe for overclocking. In short, it maintains the Tomahawk's reputation for offering a solid, overclockable home—even for flagship CPUs. Other perks include four SATA ports while some B850 boards such as the ASUS ROG Strix B850-F Gaming Wi-Fi have dropped to two, a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps Type-C front panel header and a 3 A/36 W fan header too, which are definitely features you'd normally expect to see further up the price scale these days. The negatives include mediocre M.2 SSD cooling, especially for PCIe Gen 5 SSDs, which isn't a new issue by any means as you need enormous double-sided M.2 heatsinks to really make a difference here, and a middling number and speed of rear I/O panel USB ports. Again, seven ports and four of these being USB 2.0 is likely not a huge issue for most, but you get more ports and faster ones on other B850 boards as well as M.2 heatsinks that are able to deal with current toasty PCIe Gen 5 SSDs. Aesthetically it's maybe a little no-frills and has no RGB lighting of its own, but it still looks better than many of the sub $200 boards out there. MSI's software is also a mixed bag. It's done the right thing of separating various elements and unlike a year or two ago, there's no ghastly multiple-stage installation process. Sticking to the fan control and RGB lighting installs presents a minimum of fuss and bloatware, and they work relatively well. Coming to conclusions with a B850 motherboard is turning out to be quite complicated as there are so many alternatives and also crossover in terms of features. You have B650, B650E, X670, X670E, the competition on the same chipset as well as X870 options and all of these fall within $30 or so either side of the board we're looking at today so are very valid comparisons. To start with, there are cheaper and older boards out there that offer USB4, which this board lacks, and have similar features otherwise given MSI has been quite aggressive in cutting them here to get to a lower price point. That also means that features you'd see on more expensive 800-series chipset boards such as multiple tool-free M.2 heatsinks, are also more in line with what you'd see on previous generation boards in terms of a lack of them. They're certainly useful, especially if you're regularly swapping out hardware, but if you just want to build your new PC and get back to gaming and forget about upgrading for a few years then the PC build process taking a little longer likely won't matter as much as saving cash. It's worth remembering that many of those older boards likely need a Ryzen 8000 or 9000-series CPU for USB4 support and some of these, as well as being increasingly rare, also lack Wi-Fi 7and dip down to inferior audio codecs too. The MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk Wi-Fi, for example, doesn't really offer anything more, has slower Ethernet and Wi-Fi and still sees lane sharing between some PCIe slots and M.2 slots. Stepping up in price on 800-series chipsets, either B850 or X870 will see USB4 become common place and certainly offer better homes for PCIe Gen 5 SSDs, which is perhaps the main fly in the ointment here. But realistically, PCIe Gen 4 SSDs are still the likely target of most potential owners and will be for much of the life of this board. You might gain more aesthetic prowess and a bigger accessory set, but the MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max Wi-Fi has everything you need in terms of VRM cooling and fan headers to power a monster system and with Wi-Fi 7 and PCIe Gen 5 in tow too, we doubt you'll be considering an upgrade until Socket AM5 is dead and buried. As usual, the Tomahawk punches above its weight, albeit not on all areas, but it's still a decent choice if you have between $200 and $250 to spend.