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It’s the end of the year and you just got a big juicy bonus from whatever job it is that you do. You’re wondering to yourself, what should you buy?! Sure, you could be a big boy and put it away. Save it for a rainy day. Of course, you’re not going to do that. You want to spend it all on a big shiny new piece of tech. Hardcore gaming tech. That’s why I’m talking about the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi.
MSI approached us awhile back, asking if we could take a look at the motherboard…so took a look I did.
Came away much impressed, I did too!
I mean just take a look at this beauty.
Maybe it’s me…but that color scheme rocks.
The lime green (at least that’s what it looks like to me) highlights accentuates all the right parts. You’d think the green would make it look…well, icky. It doesn’t! I know, I’m surprised too!
All the carbon black and chrome on the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi actually makes it pop! Sometimes it even looks like its neon instead of just being paint highlights.
Looks aside, the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi actually has some beefy chops too. This is for the hardcore gamer and the specs easily bear that out.
You can read the full breakdown here, but the gist of it is that the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi comes with WiFi 7, 2.5G LAN, DDR5 RAM compatibility, PCIe 5.0, the MSI’s m.2 Shield Frozr tech, and of course, compatibility with Intel’s 14th and 13th Gen CPUs.
It also caters to every type of cooling style you can think of, with a host of pin-header locations to plug the cooling solutions into. Liquid cooling or fan, the motherboard has you covered.
The MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi is also host to the usual array of I/O ports, so there’s really nothing surprising on that end. Again, if you’re interested on what they are, click on the link above, or peep the image up top.
In our case, MSI also sent over the Intel Core i7-14700K for us to play around with, which you can see in the images.
Ultimately, it wasn’t what the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi is capable of that impressed me the most. It’s the intuitiveness and user friendly nature of the motherboard.
Building a PC rig isn’t easy, as anybody who’s built machines in the 90s, and 2000s can tell you. Motherboards used to be fragile pieces of tech. Press a bit too hard in the wrong place and you’re SOL. Something’s going to snap.
Tech has thankfully strengthened modern motherboards, but most of them are still unwieldy to work with, especially for clumsy fogeys like me. I don’t have the manual dexterity I used to have, so anything to make things easier for me, I’ll take.
MSI has done exactly that.
The latch for the CPU core? A bit bigger than usual (at least it felt that way to me) and is unlatched relatively easily. The clips that hold the DDR5 RAM? Bigger, so your fingers and easily find purchase on them.
Of course, MSI’s Steel Armor (reinforcement for the GPU slot) is also integrated into the motherboard, so there’s no need to worry about your precious GPU warping the board or worse, snapping its connectors right off.
Hand down, the best part of it all though is that the m.2 Shield Frozr covering for your SSDs. They don’t even require screws no more!
You just tab them out, twist the clip inside to secure your SSD and then put on the Shield Frozr again! I cannot emphasize just how tremendously awesome that is.
I don’t know why it’s taken this long for something like this to be implemented on motherboards!
So the bottom line is this.
If you have money burning a hole in your pocket and you want a motherboard that utilize the best tech out there right now, the MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi is what you want. You can thank me later.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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