25 B-450 Boards Analyzed

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Nightfire

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The folks at Anandtech has a very comprehensive article of a wide variety of value Ryzen Motherboards:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1309...md-ryzen-a-quick-look-at-all-the-motherboards

Amazingly, all of these boards are $130 or less.

For the ITX fans, both the ASUS Strix and MSI gaming plus AC look stellar. Both have 6+2 VRM setups with the Strix supporting up to 3600 mhz Ram with the MSI going up to 3466 mhz. The biggest letdown of the Strix is that it only has 1 video output which is a bummer for those of us using multiple screens.
 
I'm pretty sure the Strix is 4+4 (which makes no sense and is a waste of a good VRM pair) like its desktop counterpart and the heatsink is very poor. Runs very hot without active cooling under stress tests.
 
For now, ASUS and Gigabyte should be avoided in regards to B-450:


If you are getting RAven Ridge, Look for MSI for sure, as the ASrock B-350 does not have iGPU overclocking and I suspect the B-450 version lacks it as well.
 
It is possible that Steve had a bad board as others like Guru3d saw better results.
 
Nightfire said:
It is possible that Steve had a bad board as others like Guru3d saw better results.
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Doubt it, Gigabyte clearly uses less chips and more chokes, then any other manufacturer, which is so backwards. I remember back in the AM3 days I got a UD770 it was I think for 70 bucks, that board had the same VRM as the high end boards, just without heatsink, which was super easy to solve.
 
any 6-layer PCB boards from gigabyte that would meet the requirement for ECC unbuffered mode (with RAM running in ECC mode!)?
 
Dougie said:
Doubt it, Gigabyte clearly uses less chips and more chokes, then any other manufacturer, which is so backwards. I remember back in the AM3 days I got a UD770 it was I think for 70 bucks, that board had the same VRM as the high end boards, just without heatsink, which was super easy to solve.
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yup saw the same thing on a few different boards back in the am2/+/3 era, best one though was a biostar board i had which was officially rated at 95w and cost 65 bucks, they had another model rated at 125w. same vrm's and everything only difference was the vrm's had a heatsink and 50 dollar higher price tag so i just took some vram heatsinks and slapped them on there, boom x4 940 worked perfectly on the board(until one of the heatsinks fell off after about a year, lol).
 
Nightfire said:
The folks at Anandtech has a very comprehensive article of a wide variety of value Ryzen Motherboards:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1309...md-ryzen-a-quick-look-at-all-the-motherboards

Amazingly, all of these boards are $130 or less.

For the ITX fans, both the ASUS Strix and MSI gaming plus AC look stellar. Both have 6+2 VRM setups with the Strix supporting up to 3600 mhz Ram with the MSI going up to 3466 mhz. The biggest letdown of the Strix is that it only has 1 video output which is a bummer for those of us using multiple screens.
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I've heard while the Asus ITX x460/b450 have 6 phase VRMs, they only have 1 phase for the SOC, making it a bad choice for APU users. (Could I be confusing it with the X370/b350 models?)

The MSI ITX board does have a 6 phase VRM, but its heatsink will need some extra airflow to keep temps under control.
 
Neapolitan6th said:
I've heard while the Asus ITX x460/b450 have 6 phase VRMs, they only have 1 phase for the SOC, making it a bad choice for APU users. (Could I be confusing it with the X370/b350 models?)

The MSI ITX board does have a 6 phase VRM, but its heatsink will need some extra airflow to keep temps under control.
Click to expand...

My Asus Tuf b350 was 6+2 and so is the Strix b450 itx. Mine was great with an APU and had a great bios. For APUs, MSI and Asus are the only ways to go but Steve is doing a test with the 2400g in the future.

For overclocks with the 2700x, Asus is not the best choice.
 
The Buildzoid vid mentioned a lack of functioning negative offset voltage in the MSI boards.
 
MSI bios is not perfect, but it sounds like he was a bit nitpicky. For those that might switch from an APU to an 8 core, MSI is solid.
 
Nightfire said:
My Asus Tuf b350 was 6+2 and so is the Strix b450 itx. Mine was great with an APU and had a great bios. For APUs, MSI and Asus are the only ways to go but Steve is doing a test with the 2400g in the future.

For overclocks with the 2700x, Asus is not the best choice.
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The TUF b350 and b450 boards seem to have 4 phase VRMs, at least according to the hardwareluxx.de forums (where buildzoid referenced from). Link

Not trying to crap on it, I'm sure its a perfectly good board. There you can see most b350 boards from all vendors are either 4 or 3+3 boards.
 
I'm thinking dude got a bad B450 Auros, or I have golden sample...

upload_2018-8-3_11-4-18.png


What I can say, is the voltage on this board is out of control, offset doesn't seem to do shit.
 
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I like some things that MSI has done for their B450 boards, the Tomahawk in particular.

The B450 Tomahawk has 4 mosfets per phase on the vcore side where the older B350 had only 3. That has to help with thermals. Plus it's got a larger and better heatsink.
http://www.expreview.com/63079-all.html
https://www.overclockers.ua/motherboard/msi-b350-tomahawk/

The new Tomahawk also has bios flashback+ so you don't need a cpu to flash the bios. It probably doesn't mean much now, but could be helpful in the future when a new series of cpus is released and you find yourself with no old cpu to update the bios. People with B350 and X370 boards are having that problem now sometimes.
 
pgaster said:
I like some things that MSI has done for their B450 boards, the Tomahawk in particular.

The B450 Tomahawk has 4 mosfets per phase on the vcore side where the older B350 had only 3. That has to help with thermals. Plus it's got a larger and better heatsink.
http://www.expreview.com/63079-all.html
https://www.overclockers.ua/motherboard/msi-b350-tomahawk/

The new Tomahawk also has bios flashback+ so you don't need a cpu to flash the bios. It probably doesn't mean much now, but could be helpful in the future when a new series of cpus is released and you find yourself with no old cpu to update the bios. People with B350 and X370 boards are having that problem now sometimes.
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The B450 Auros is going back, its a sad day, Gigabyte is dead to me :(

I have an MSI B450 Pro Carbon coming, although for the cheap it was hard passing up the fake phase ASRock...
 
Sodapopjones said:
The B450 Auros is going back, its a sad day, Gigabyte is dead to me :(

I have an MSI B450 Pro Carbon coming, although for the cheap it was hard passing up the fake phase ASRock...
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The ASRock may only be a 3+2 but it does actually have the mosfets and chokes for a 6+2, just driven in parallel so the control isn't as fine. I have the B350 one and it overclocks my 1800X just as well as my high end X370 boards (and surprisingly does better on memory as well).
 
LigTasm said:
The ASRock may only be a 3+2 but it does actually have the mosfets and chokes for a 6+2, just driven in parallel so the control isn't as fine. I have the B350 one and it overclocks my 1800X just as well as my high end X370 boards (and surprisingly does better on memory as well).
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One thing I would like to point out, 2700X pulls more power than a 1800X and is more demanding on the VRMs.
 
MrDeaf said:
One thing I would like to point out, 2700X pulls more power than a 1800X and is more demanding on the VRMs.
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My 1800X at 4050 on all 8 cores pulls down a bit more power than my 2700X did stock, but I wouldn't run either of those for long on a budget board anyways. Just saying it could do it, not that you should. Although for a budget board it surprises me that its one of very few AM4 that have two m.2 slots.
 
LigTasm said:
My 1800X at 4050 on all 8 cores pulls down a bit more power than my 2700X did stock, but I wouldn't run either of those for long on a budget board anyways. Just saying it could do it, not that you should. Although for a budget board it surprises me that its one of very few AM4 that have two m.2 slots.
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The thing is, my B350 Tomhawk did better than the X470 Prime Pro and the Auros B450 (which is utter garbage, like beyond garbage) MSI has ram down pretty good, I'm hopeful for the Pro Carbon, but I really would like to mess around with the ASRock.

My return pile minus the B350...

upload_2018-8-3_23-15-30.png
 

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Sodapopjones said:
The thing is, my B350 Tomhawk did better than the X470 Prime Pro and the Auros B450 (which is utter garbage, like beyond garbage) MSI has ram down pretty good, I'm hopeful for the Pro Carbon, but I really would like to mess around with the ASRock.

My return pile minus the B350...
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I feel your pain, I went through 7 or 8 different AM4 boards and ended up with 3 of them that I still have.

Both of my Crosshair boards failed miserably within a few days (X370 and X470) and my Strix ITX board had a bad m.2 slot. Not doing so hot on the expensive Asus ones, Gigabyte was just as bad but mostly with memory and stability. The cheap ASRock and the Asus B350 Prime whatever it was were the only good ones out of the lot.
 
Sodapopjones said:
The thing is, my B350 Tomhawk did better than the X470 Prime Pro and the Auros B450 (which is utter garbage, like beyond garbage) MSI has ram down pretty good, I'm hopeful for the Pro Carbon, but I really would like to mess around with the ASRock.

My return pile minus the B350...

View attachment 93915
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Mad respect for putting up with the hassle of finding the right board! What a pain that must have been.
 
Neapolitan6th said:
Mad respect for putting up with the hassle of finding the right board! What a pain that must have been.
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Thanks... Its not by choice but the AM4 socket has got to be the worst I have dealt with in the last 20 years when it comes to finding a quality/stable board for the money. I really hope the Pro Carbon works out, or its onto the ASRock.
 
Steve at Hardware Unboxed picked his favorites:



ASRock and MSI really steal the show. Among his favorites were the MSI Tomahawk and Gaming Carbon.

Some of these B450 boards have better VRM setups than alot of X470s so the claim "you need an X470/X370 to get max o/c from an R7" is blatantly false.
 
Is it reasonable to state that the VRM limitations mentioned on some of these boards would apply only to R7 and overclocked APU applications, and that an R5 would do fine?
The MSI offset issue may be more of an issue if using PBO.
 
Nightfire said:
Steve at Hardware Unboxed picked his favorites:



ASRock and MSI really steal the show. Among his favorites were the MSI Tomahawk and Gaming Carbon.

Some of these B450 boards have better VRM setups than alot of X470s so the claim "you need an X470/X370 to get max o/c from an R7" is blatantly false.
Click to expand...

His picks are ok for the most part, but he did get some of the specifics wrong. For instance he said the ITX Strix would be better for APUs, but it actually only has 1 SOC phase. While he said the MSI ITX was a doubled 3 phase when in fact it is a 6 phase with 2 SOC phases. (On paper the MSI ITX looks like the best value here).

With the b450 Tomahawk, it is an undoubled 4 phase. The b450 pro AC would be better as it has a doubled 4 phase.

So I really don't understand what he is trying to say here. After his extenisve benchmark videos, I always took his content as being more technical. However, now I must question that.

He really needs to put more time into actually analyzing the VRMs before making recommendations to people.

Some budget X470 boards will be worse than good b450, but an X470 with a 6 or 8 phase will most definitely blow any b450 VRM out of the water.

(I'm not 100% which is better a doubled 4 phase, or a 6 phase undoubled. I will have to look into that more)

In the end, you really do get what you pay for.

Reference
 
Neapolitan6th said:
His picks are ok for the most part, but he did get some of the specifics wrong. For instance he said the ITX Strix would be better for APUs, but it actually only has 1 SOC phase. While he said the MSI ITX was a doubled 3 phase when in fact it is a 6 phase with 2 SOC phases. (On paper the MSI ITX looks like the best value here).

With the b450 Tomahawk, it is an undoubled 4 phase. The b450 pro AC would be better as it has a doubled 4 phase.

So I really don't understand what he is trying to say here. After his extenisve benchmark videos, I always took his content as being more technical. However, now I must question that.

He really needs to put more time into actually analyzing the VRMs before making recommendations to people.

Some budget X470 boards will be worse than good b450, but an X470 with a 6 or 8 phase will most definitely blow any b450 VRM out of the water.

(I'm not 100% which is better a doubled 4 phase, or a 6 phase undoubled. I will have to look into that more)

In the end, you really do get what you pay for.

Reference
Click to expand...

The biggest determining factor of VRM's quality is number of mosfet chips and quality thereof, that is assuming you want maximum stable power available. Having less chips can make VRM more power efficient.
 
Neapolitan6th said:
Some budget X470 boards will be worse than good b450, but an X470 with a 6 or 8 phase will most definitely blow any b450 VRM out of the water.

(I'm not 100% which is better a doubled 4 phase, or a 6 phase undoubled. I will have to look into that more)

In the end, you really do get what you pay for.

Reference
Click to expand...

At which point the CPU limitations will come in to play far before the motherboard limitations. So what are you really paying for? Liquid Nitrogen support?

It is like paying twice as much for a TV since it can decode 8k although we won't get 8k content for quiet some time and claiming "you get what you pay for".

I am not an expert on VRMs, but I just know that simply having more is not better. The capacity of the VRM and cooling play a very key role here as well.
 
Yeah, I will add none of what I said matters for %95 of consumers. It totally understand why the manufactuers make them the way they do.

The general VRM marketing just comes off as disingenuous and I wish more people would make a point of calling manufactuers out on their shenanigans.

That's not to say these b450 boards are bad. Feature set will typically reign supreme here probably as it should.

I think the reason it is a bigger deal with Ryzen is that you are buying a platform with the promise of support for newer CPUs down the road. It is hard to know what TDP those will be so it makes the quality VRMs more of a point of concern.

I am in no way qualified to tell someone what makes the best VRM, but I try to speak up when advertising and reality don't line up.

And about getting what you pay for: I mean to say there will always be compromise when it comes to finding a good value. Its just a matter of what is more and less important to the end user. More consumers demand more features, I/O, RGB, etc... So it makes sense that a value oriented product would reflect that. At the same time, that might mean the VRM won't be anything special (though not bad!)
 
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Neapolitan6th said:
Yeah, I will add none of what I said matters for %95 of consumers. It totally understand why the manufactuers make them the way they do.

The general VRM marketing just comes off as disingenuous and I wish more people would make a point of calling manufactuers out on their shenanigans.

That's not to say these b450 boards are bad. Feature set will typically reign supreme here probably as it should.

I think the reason it is a bigger deal with Ryzen is that you are buying a platform with the promise of support for newer CPUs down the road. It is hard to know what TDP those will be so it makes the quality VRMs more of a point of concern.

I am in no way qualified to tell someone what makes the best VRM, but I try to speak up when advertising and reality don't line up.

And about getting what you pay for: I mean to say there will always be compromise when it comes to finding a good value. Its just a matter of what is more and less important to the end user. More consumers demand more features, I/O, RGB, etc... So it makes sense that a value oriented product would reflect that. At the same time, that might mean the VRM won't be anything special (though not bad!)
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The thing is the first wave of B350 boards were trash (I am sure someone will say differently) and with the price of the B450's not being more than $10 then them, I don't see the point of keeping an old board in favor of a new chipset especially with the upgraded VRMs. I mean if $99 is totally going to screw you, you probably shouldn't be upgrading to a new CPU every year or two to begin with...
 
Dougie said:
The biggest determining factor of VRM's quality is number of mosfet chips and quality thereof, that is assuming you want maximum stable power available. Having less chips can make VRM more power efficient.
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Well, unless you have fake phases, because those mosfets are wired together on the board and only function to spread the work and heat load.

and then you have Gigabyte removing the hi-side mosfets on their wired together double scheme...

 
MrDeaf said:
Well, unless you have fake phases, because those mosfets are wired together on the board and only function to spread the work and heat load.

and then you have Gigabyte removing the hi-side mosfets on their wired together double scheme...

Click to expand...


Yeah, but those mosfets are still doing work and expanding the output capacity of the VRM, maybe that VRM is not perfectly tuned, and will not have as precise of a voltage, but those mosfet chips is the only reason that VRM can output as much power as it does. Besides the voltages are still in spec.

I'm not saying I agree with Gigabyte overall their design is wasteful, but the only reason they are doing this is because consumers respond to number of chokes/coils, as having better VRM, basically they are accommodating wants of uneducated consumers.

Now if consumers responded the same way to specific mosfet chips, the VRM designs would be much better thoughout the whole motherboard industry.
 
Just for perspective, I did a suicide run with a Bristol Ridge chip on a B-350 ASUS. Power at the walls was 250 watts running timespy meaning this was a tougher test on VRMs than most any 2700x. My current 2400g sees up to 160 watts in full boil.

With even better VRMs than the B350s, these B450s will be fine for all except those that plan on using Ln2 or want SLI. PERIOD.
 
Sodapopjones said:
The B450 Auros is going back, its a sad day, Gigabyte is dead to me :(

I have an MSI B450 Pro Carbon coming, although for the cheap it was hard passing up the fake phase ASRock...
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Soda, I've had my eyes on that board (MSI B450 Pro Carbon) for a good while, and now that it's out I'm going to get one when they are back in stock at a decent price. I'm old school and haven't updated my systems in quite a while and am a little hesitant wondering if the RGB will annoy me and I absolutely despise having unnecessary processes running. Can you PLEASE let me know if the UEFI on your MSI B450 Pro Carbon gives you flexibility to deal with the Mystic Lights RGB stuff? Like can you just turn it off from the UEFI if you wanted to? Or are you limited to controlling RGB from within the OS with the MSI Gaming App (god I hate that everything has gaming in the name).

I'm sure the lights are nice, but that would suck if the RGB just autopilots outside the Windows OS or if you do not have the MSI RGB control software installed. BTW you are doing the right thing dumping that Gigabyte board, I ran an MSI nforce 3 Ultra board for years with a 400mhz OC on an old socket 939 and a heavily BIOS overclocked NGREEDIA card for years without a hiccup. I see some folks rip on MSI but all their stuff that I've used at work and at home and for friends has been pretty good.

Thanks in advance if you are able to comb through your spankin' new boards BIOS to see if you have any control over RGB at all from there (fingers crossed B450 boards won't need lots of BIOS hotfix love!)
 
Jza said:
Soda, I've had my eyes on that board (MSI B450 Pro Carbon) for a good while, and now that it's out I'm going to get one when they are back in stock at a decent price. I'm old school and haven't updated my systems in quite a while and am a little hesitant wondering if the RGB will annoy me and I absolutely despise having unnecessary processes running. Can you PLEASE let me know if the UEFI on your MSI B450 Pro Carbon gives you flexibility to deal with the Mystic Lights RGB stuff? Like can you just turn it off from the UEFI if you wanted to? Or are you limited to controlling RGB from within the OS with the MSI Gaming App (god I hate that everything has gaming in the name).

I'm sure the lights are nice, but that would suck if the RGB just autopilots outside the Windows OS or if you do not have the MSI RGB control software installed. BTW you are doing the right thing dumping that Gigabyte board, I ran an MSI nforce 3 Ultra board for years with a 400mhz OC on an old socket 939 and a heavily BIOS overclocked NGREEDIA card for years without a hiccup. I see some folks rip on MSI but all their stuff that I've used at work and at home and for friends has been pretty good.

Thanks in advance if you are able to comb through your spankin' new boards BIOS to see if you have any control over RGB at all from there (fingers crossed B450 boards won't need lots of BIOS hotfix love!)
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I just got the Pro Carbon up and running, pretty much night and day from the Gigabyte and ASUS X470 Prime Pro. The heatsinks are stupid beefy, the chipset heatsink barely cleared my 1070FTW, I'm pretty sure if I wiggle it up and down I'm going to scrape the heatsink on my card... I dug through the bios and manual, it doesn't look like you can turn off the RGB in the bios, you need the Command App, but they're really not bad, the photo's online are misleading.

Going to put this guy through the paces, enjoyed just popping my parts in the stupid thing and off I'm going, no fucking around just to get my comp to boot...
 
Sodapopjones said:
I just got the Pro Carbon up and running, pretty much night and day from the Gigabyte and ASUS X470 Prime Pro. The heatsinks are stupid beefy, the chipset heatsink barely cleared my 1070FTW, I'm pretty sure if I wiggle it up and down I'm going to scrape the heatsink on my card... I dug through the bios and manual, it doesn't look like you can turn off the RGB in the bios, you need the Command App, but they're really not bad, the photo's online are misleading.

Going to put this guy through the paces, enjoyed just popping my parts in the stupid thing and off I'm going, no fucking around just to get my comp to boot...
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Thanks for the report back, and I greatly appreciate the effort in scouring the BIOS for RGB controls. Now I just have to decide if I want to get something without RGB just in case. But man that board has all the stuff I like. Built in wifi in case you're moving around and RJ45 is out of reach, VRM design I suspect to be ample enough. Those cooling heatsinks are a big plus as you mentioned, especially that they don't appear to have the ridiculous plastic shroud that extends from the built-in IO shields some boards have. Yeah yeah I could just get a USB wifi dongle in a pinch, but I like a little overkill, and the B450 Pro Carbon seems pretty high in bang for buck. I think retailers see the immediate demand for this gem to the point where customer gouging has occurred. I already saw it on sale for 200+ on one site. The word is out that this is among the best B450 boards.

Also the tame color scheme the board has looks good. MSI has played out the red theme and Gigabyte's orange, no thanks. The B450 Pro Carbon is 1 of my possible 2 plans... get it and throw it into a Fractal Design Meshify C with some 3200mhz and a 2600/2600x, or just scrap that whole idea and go mITX. I'm leaning towards going back to my ATX mid tower roots because the cases aren't so honkingly big and obnoxious as they used to be.

What CPU and memory did you go with, and what case if you don't mind me asking?
 
Jza said:
Thanks for the report back, and I greatly appreciate the effort in scouring the BIOS for RGB controls. Now I just have to decide if I want to get something without RGB just in case. But man that board has all the stuff I like. Built in wifi in case you're moving around and RJ45 is out of reach, VRM design I suspect to be ample enough. Those cooling heatsinks are a big plus as you mentioned, especially that they don't appear to have the ridiculous plastic shroud that extends from the built-in IO shields some boards have. Yeah yeah I could just get a USB wifi dongle in a pinch, but I like a little overkill, and the B450 Pro Carbon seems pretty high in bang for buck. I think retailers see the immediate demand for this gem to the point where customer gouging has occurred. I already saw it on sale for 200+ on one site. The word is out that this is among the best B450 boards.

Also the tame color scheme the board has looks good. MSI has played out the red theme and Gigabyte's orange, no thanks. The B450 Pro Carbon is 1 of my possible 2 plans... get it and throw it into a Fractal Design Meshify C with some 3200mhz and a 2600/2600x, or just scrap that whole idea and go mITX. I'm leaning towards going back to my ATX mid tower roots because the cases aren't so honkingly big and obnoxious as they used to be.

What CPU and memory did you go with, and what case if you don't mind me asking?
Click to expand...

I have a 2700X, with 3200 Corsair LPX CL 16, and I have a Raidmax Gama for the case (not a small case).

I picked up the Pro Carbon for $129..from Newegg..
 
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I'm looking at Ryzen mobos, too, now. Specifically, I'm considering a R5 2600 and the MSI B450 Pro Carbon mobo - the one you guys are talking about. Any updates or further thoughts about it? How did you configure your storage? I was thinking of getting an NVME M.2 PCIe 3.0 x 4 SSD for one slot you get - 500/512GB or so. I haven't decided on a gpu yet - might need one if I keep my current computer - I have a video card in that one and no onboard graphics.
 
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