@Paul Baxter I do actually suggest what I would have done to make the board better in the review and even expand upon what I say in the review in another post
, unfortunately there isn't anything that can be done to really improve the Tomahawks failings by the user. The best you can do with the on-board audio is try some modded Realtek drivers for a more complete audio package but those drivers are a serious pain in the arse to get working properly, in fact out of the 3-4 attempts I made I couldn't get the Nahimic or Sonic Studio software working the former would crash on launch and the latter would suffer some kind of driver timeout. The Creative suit seemed to work... but that's crap.
Link for modded drivers. As for physical alternatives I'd say find yourself either a used Xonar DX 7.1 or Xonar SOAR, other sound cards are about on the level of the ALC1200 on the Tomahawk, but something like the Xonar AE for example is
probably much better implemented on the PCB, no guarantees on that though I've not reviewed it and Asus have released some real turds in their later, "updated" and "revised" Xonar cards. The one thing you can do prior to building the system is remove the rear IO plate and use some flat nosed gripless pliers to ensure the brass nuts for the built-in WIFI are good and tight, during the review they came very loose and the antenna just flopped about like worms.
Probably my greatest annoyance about the board now though is that MSI released a beta firmware update with AGESA 1.2.0.3C August 27th and it is STILL in beta, compare that to even Asus who are FAR from perfect when it comes to firmware updates and for the X570 TUF Gaming they had a final version firmware with AGESA 1.2.0.3C August 17th, so not only were MSI 2 weeks slower the update they delivered was only beta, 3 months down the line MSI still can't release a final version. If anyone is to build an AM4 system right now the only X570 boards I'd recommend are the Asus TUF X570-Plus (weaker VRM, but better in every other way except SATA port layout and still plenty robust enough for a high end CPU)... and thats it. Manufacturers failed hard with the X570 boards, the "S" X570 models are absurdly overpriced for the few that are about, and many other X570 boards are just flat out not worth the money, there are certainly better boards you can get than the X570 TUF, but the more you spend the return on your investment drops dramatically the TUF is about 85-90% as good as some of the most expensive boards you can buy.
Gigabyte are a special case, and not the good kind, their X570 boards can, and do, spontaneously die with alarming regularity this has been going on for some time and in some cases the boards literally do not have hardware they advertise. At least with some revisions, I had a v1.1 X570 Aorus Pro I think it was intended for review (still don't know if I can be bothered to finish that review) that advertised a backup ROM chip on the product page of Gigabytes site, but on physical inspection of the board I had that backup chip was flat out AWOL from the PCB. Suffice to say Gigabyte did not take too kindly to me bringing this up publicly... I'll let you fill in the blanks of what happened next given their recent reputation of incompentence like ******* off all of China for a jab they made about their boards not being made in China, and trying to sweep under the rug PSUs they have been making that will literally blow up.
Link for that. In short, never touch Gigabye regardless of if its for a mainboard, GPU, or PSU.
You can avoid Dragon Center entirely if you don't care about LED control, utilities like CPU-Z and HWInfo64 do exactly the same job, and more competently and in more detail. Should you want to use the LEDs however you can also look at Open RGB and Signal RGB. As for Windows 11, just avoid that completely for now its slower than W10 and has a plethora of bugs, IF the OS is fixed properly you're looking at a year down the line at least, in other words, the first or second major update.
I have a lot more reviews and articles to come, including putting ones I've already done into video form for my YT channel my problem is getting the time to do it.
