Msi b350 TOMAHAWK ARCTIC vs gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3

[geekhamo]

Will be running Ryzen 1600 & GTX 1060 Armor OC 6gb, 2400 ram, 2tb hard drive and maybe a 120gb SSD in the future for a faster boot time

I like the MSI because it matches my white theme, it has usb C and it is $30 cheaper in my country

Gigabyte is more popular here, has RGB, dual bios, more sata ports and better reviews

I'll use my pc mostly for gaming and yes I'm into overclocking, I can't decide pls help me

 

[drea.drechsler]

I have both a gigabyte AB350m Gaming 3 and an MSI B350m Mortar. They are the mATX boards that are pretty much comparable to the ATX boards you're choosing from. So...speaking from MY experience on THESE boards I'd say go with the MSI B350 Tomahawk. And that's NOT because you like the white color scheme but because I think it will be hands down the better choice.

First to consider is that Gigabyte has had a lot of problems getting decent, stable BIOS updates out in a timely manner. While they do have an AGESA 1006b out now (finally) it's still not compatible with as many 3200 kits as the MSI... in fact I can get my 2666 kit stable at 3066 with my Mortar where the Gaming 3 was barely stable with the same kit at 2933.

I'm also able to get a much higher (3.95 vs 3.825Ghz) and more stable overclock on my 1700 with the Mortar. To be fair, though, the B350 G3 (ATX) may do better since it has a slightly different control scheme for the VRM but the FET's are the same and will probably overheat much sooner than the Tomahawk's under heavy, overclocked, load just as the mATX G3 will.

Overall, the Mortar has a much better, easier to use and more complete BIOS. I also like that there are more fan headers... i think that's true on the Tomahawk too. While the G3 has a USB 3.1 G2 port I still haven't found I miss it since I've no G2 devices. Same can be said of the USB 3.1 Ty C port on the Mortar though.

Lastly, there's a problem with many of GB's AM4 boards where they 'soft brick' for seeming unknown reasons. The only fix is to pull the CMOS battery and let it fully discharge for 30 min's or so. It seems to be related to the use of certain monitoring utilities so you have to be careful. My G3 did it several times after I used HWInfo64 while stress testing.

All that said I do have a beef with the Mortar: for some reason the system won't start up with BIOS set to 'Windows10 WHQL mode', it will only run in compatibility mode (CSM I think it's called). I'm not sure why, nobody has answered, but it could be related to how I changed over motherboards: I just pulled the NVME, processor, memory and GPU from the OLD system (the Gaming 3 mobo) and plugged it all into the NEW system with the Mortar. It seemed to work OK though...until I went to go to WHQL mode.