MSI’s X299 Tomahawk Arctic motherboard brings the chill

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A feature-rich motherboard for Intel's Core-X series.

If you're planning to build a system around one of Intel's new Kaby Lake-X or Skylake-X processors, some of which went up for preorder today, you'll need a new motherboard based on Intel's LGA 2066 socket. One such option is MSI's new X299 Tomahawk Arctic.

Built for "ice-cold domination," the X299 Tomahawk Arctic is essentially a white and gray-themed X299 Tomahawk with plenty of cooling potential. The motherboard is outfitted with six fan headers and offers full fan control through the BIOS and software. Either way, you can configure four temperature targets for the CPU and motherboard, and the fan speeds will adjust automatically based on your parameters.

There is also a dedicated water pump PIN header that supports up to 2A. This can also be controlled through the BIOS and software.

Beefy heatsinks cover the chipset and VRM. These along with the rear I/O shroud also feature brushed aluminum inserts.

Other notable features include reinforced PCI-Express ports to protect against bending and EMI, dual M.2 ports for gum stick-sized SSDs, double grounding layered mounting holes to prevent ESD damage, and a built-in amplifier for using headphones.

You can install as much as 128GB of DDR4-4266 (OC) memory into this motherboard. There are four PCIe x16 slots, two PCIe x1 slots, eight SATA 6Gbps ports, a U.2 port, and a fairly wide selection of USB 3.1 and 2.0 ports.

MSI did not say when this board will be available or what it will cost.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).