Which b450 am4 motherboard is best?

[eamon butler]

I have a limited budget and I'm looking for a motherboard to go with the ryzen 5 2600 in buying. The three options I have my eye on atm is asrock B450 GAMING K4, MSI B450 GAMING PLUS, MSI b450-A PRO. They are all essentially the same price and I don't really care about aesthetics (my pc is mainly red and black though).

If there are better options for the same price as these, I would love offers. My case is atx size but I was looking at m-atx to begin with because they are cheaper so I am willing to go with a nice m-atx if it doesn't give up m.2 nvme support and at least 4 Sata drives.

 

[Lutfij]

1| Where are you located, how much do these boards costs and how much are you looking to spend on the board?
2| What is your preferred site of purchase?
3| Might want to share your proposed build with us as well.
4| Essentially speaking the three you've posted are all the same.
5| Best pick out an matx board for an matx case. It's pointless getting a larger case for smaller components.

 

[eamon butler]

I live in Australia, I have them at around $130 aud with a combination of coupons and price matching. My price limit is about that or if it's worth it $15 more.
Ebay have a price match but I'm price matching them from new egg.
My build is a ryzen 5 2600, 16gb ram, m.2 storage and I already have a few Sata drives, case and a r9 290 gpu from the pc this is replacing so m-atx would be purely be for cost efficiency and better features/performance

 

[ohenryy]

If you are comparing MSI to Asrock, I would say get the Asrock. As I said previously the MSI can be quite buggy, they lack consistency with their bios, while some models they actually might have a decent design, they fail on the implemtation on the Bios to run properly. Where Asrock does very good, specialy on overclocking, coupled with a design that is very overclock friendly.

 

[eamon butler]

If you are comparing MSI to Asrock, I would say get the Asrock. As I said previously the MSI can be quite buggy, they lack consistency with their bios, while some models they actually might have a decent design, they fail on the implemtation on the Bios to run properly. Where Asrock does very good, specialy on overclocking, coupled with a design that is very overclock friendly.

ok so I found the ASRock B450 Pro4 for $15 cheaper, is there any downside (reason for it to be so much cheaper) to this motherboard?

 

[drea.drechsler]

If you are comparing MSI to Asrock, I would say get the Asrock. As I said previously the MSI can be quite buggy, they lack consistency with their bios, while some models they actually might have a decent design, they fail on the implemtation on the Bios to run properly. Where Asrock does very good, specialy on overclocking, coupled with a design that is very overclock friendly.

ok so I found the ASRock B450 Pro4 for $15 cheaper, is there any downside (reason for it to be so much cheaper) to this motherboard?

While the B350m Pro4 has proven a good board for overclocking because of it's fake doubled 3 phase VRM design (carried over to the B450m) MSI has 4 phase VRMs boards (B450m Mortar) with the same design topology that are very compelling. It's hard to knock either of them but MSI's design is considered one of the coolest for running 8 core Ryzen chips. From an overclocking perspective, both should be considered pretty equal in overall capability though.

Also don't worry about SOC capability since power draw of a 2600 from it's SOC VRM is insignificant, even if overclocked since it's not an APU.

The big discriminator should be on features: Look for USB ports: does it have 3.1 gen 2? type C as well as Type A? Also look at how many NVME ports. If it's important also look at audio: some have a decent midrange Realtek, some the low-end Realtek codecs. I don't know of any am4 mATX with high-end audio on board.

Even though the second one won't be PCIE Gen2 speed there are B450 boards with 2 NVME. That's a major advantage when it comes time to upgrade your system NVME: just plug it into the second slot and image the system onto it. I wouldn't worry too much about number of SATA ports unless you have no intention of running an NVME but need all the spinners you can stuff into the system. The reason being, even if the board has 6 sata ports 2 of them will be disabled when you plug in an NVME to the high speed NVME slot. So with one NVME you only get 4 useable SATA ports on any B450.

 

[eamon butler]

If you are comparing MSI to Asrock, I would say get the Asrock. As I said previously the MSI can be quite buggy, they lack consistency with their bios, while some models they actually might have a decent design, they fail on the implemtation on the Bios to run properly. Where Asrock does very good, specialy on overclocking, coupled with a design that is very overclock friendly.

ok so I found the ASRock B450 Pro4 for $15 cheaper, is there any downside (reason for it to be so much cheaper) to this motherboard?

While the B350m Pro4 has proven a good board for overclocking because of it's fake doubled 3 phase VRM design (carried over to the B450m) MSI has 4 phase VRMs boards (B450m Mortar) with the same design topology that are very compelling. It's hard to knock either of them but MSI's design is considered one of the coolest for running 8 core Ryzen chips. From an overclocking perspective, both should be considered pretty equal in overall capability though.

Also don't worry about SOC capability since power draw of a 2600 from it's SOC VRM is insignificant, even if overclocked since it's not an APU.

The big discriminator should be on features: Look for USB ports: does it have 3.1 gen 2? type C as well as Type A? Also look at how many NVME ports. If it's important also look at audio: some have a decent midrange Realtek, some the low-end Realtek codecs. I don't know of any am4 mATX with high-end audio on board.

Even though the second one won't be PCIE Gen2 speed there are B450 boards with 2 NVME. That's a major advantage when it comes time to upgrade your system NVME: just plug it into the second slot and image the system onto it. I wouldn't worry too much about number of SATA ports unless you have no intention of running an NVME but need all the spinners you can stuff into the system. The reason being, even if the board has 6 sata ports 2 of them will be disabled when you plug in an NVME to the high speed NVME slot. So with one NVME you only get 4 useable SATA ports on any B450.

ooh thankyou for all this information. I noticed on one of the boards that m.2 disabled two sata ports but it was only mentioned in the overview for that board and not the others I'm looking at. So is that a limitation of b450 or ryyzen? or could the other boards possibly have use of all their sata ports? Also if they do disable the sata ports what happens on the asrock boards that have two m.2 ports (it says one is PCIe 3.0 x4, while the second M.2 slot has support for both SATA and PCIe 3.0 x2), are 4 sata ports disabled leaving just two?

 

[drea.drechsler]

ooh thankyou for all this information. I noticed on one of the boards that m.2 disabled two sata ports but it was only mentioned in the overview for that board and not the others I'm looking at. So is that a limitation of b450 or ryyzen? or could the other boards possibly have use of all their sata ports? Also if they do disable the sata ports what happens on the asrock boards that have two m.2 ports (it says one is PCIe 3.0 x4, while the second M.2 slot has support for both SATA and PCIe 3.0 x2), are 4 sata ports disabled leaving just two?

Given that the Ryzen SOC PCIe lanes are common across all CPU's (Threadripper aside, of course) I suppose you could say it's a limitation of the B450. X470 does offer more lanes, therefore more SATA ports, but there are none in the mATX form factor I've seen.

If you have an extreme need for SATA ports there is X399, but that's Threadripper. There is one X399 miniITX board if i remember but none mATX either.

I think it depends on the particular motherboard how it handles plugging in a 2nd NVME. On some boards there is a second PCIe x16 slot wired as an x4 so it may take those x4 lanes. Alternatively it may take two of remaining SATA ports, i'm not really sure.

UPDATE ADD: Check again those specs for the 2nd M.2 slot: it may be SATA 3, not PCIe 3.0. Big difference.

 

[eamon butler]

ooh thankyou for all this information. I noticed on one of the boards that m.2 disabled two sata ports but it was only mentioned in the overview for that board and not the others I'm looking at. So is that a limitation of b450 or ryyzen? or could the other boards possibly have use of all their sata ports? Also if they do disable the sata ports what happens on the asrock boards that have two m.2 ports (it says one is PCIe 3.0 x4, while the second M.2 slot has support for both SATA and PCIe 3.0 x2), are 4 sata ports disabled leaving just two?

Given that the Ryzen SOC PCIe lanes are common across all CPU's (Threadripper aside, of course) I suppose you could say it's a limitation of the B450. X470 does offer more lanes, therefore more SATA ports, but there are none in the mATX form factor I've seen.

If you have an extreme need for SATA ports there is X399, but that's Threadripper. There is one X399 miniITX board if i remember but none mATX either.

I think it depends on the particular motherboard how it handles plugging in a 2nd NVME. On some boards there is a second PCIe x16 slot wired as an x4 so it may take those x4 lanes. Alternatively it may take two of remaining SATA ports, i'm not really sure.

Thanks again. I checked multiple pages and one was saying that one m.2 disables the sata while the other disables pcie x4 lane or something, so since I only have one gpu and the most id be plugging in would be a wifi card, I dont think this is much of a problem.

UPDATE ADD: Check again those specs for the 2nd M.2 slot: it may be SATA 3, not PCIe 3.0. Big difference.

That was a quote straight from the page so idk if they can both run on pcie at the same time (one being pcie3 x4 the other being pcie3 x2) or if I am using both m.2 ports one of them might have to be sata.