"Value" mATX Board AM4 or smaller

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Any thoughts on the Gigabyte b450 Auros M?

CPU will likely be a 3600x but possibly a 3800x. Also (support willing) a Zen 4 upgrade, likely an 8 core variant but that'll depend on what the actual SKUs end up being. No interest in last mile efficiency out the window type OCing.

Other options I've considered are -

Asrock B450m Pro (bios support concerns)
MSI b450m Gaming Plus (some bios concerns, 2 DIMMs)
Asus B450m-Pro Tuf (about $40 more, but better sound)

Don't really want to spend a lot on a motherboard due to lack of PCIe 4.0 support and dislike of X570. Still hoping we get something more concrete on B550. If they come with CPU PCIe 4.0 lanes to the GPU and 1 m.2, as well as PCIe 3.0 to chipset for a 2nd m.2 I'd be be willing to pay for something more high end.

Looks like mATX options over ITX due to the only options for those being higher end (eg. Asus B450i Strix, Gigabyte B450 I Auros Pro).
 
Asrock just put out the new Agea 1004 bios so still in support, if that is a concern. You may want to look more closely at the power phases if you ever plan on going 12c or 16c in the future. Otherwise the gigabyte vs asrock are in the same class in my book.
 
I'd just get the GB board. Seems pretty solid overall. I was in the same boat and ended up picking up a B450 Steel Legend ASRock board for cheap. I looked at the GB board. Usually, I prefer Asus, but the Asus board was somewhat more expensive and the "Pro" with the upgraded sound was hard to find when I was looking.
 
I ran a bottom barrel ASRock b450m hdv with a 2600 and 1700x.
All core pegged 4.2ghz on either cpu.
It was fine for gaming while recording.
 
I been running 3600's on B350 boards and as said the new AGESA 1004 Beta B has me running at 3600Mhz CL 18 in XMP profile 100% stable .
 
Core ct vs Mobo becomes an issue at 8cores, then rapidly excludes mobos at 12/16core.

I think about anything bx50/x70 can run a 6 core fine, as long as your case has enough airflow.

I got away with running a 1700x all core max clocked bc my AIOs were intake front and rear with top exhaust. I had a bunch of air moving with the bottom passively sucking whatever it wanted from the floor.

2nd nvme drive became a chipset issue bc x570 will run 2+ nvme drives at full speed. I'm running a pair of 960 Pros, and recording at high bitrate to the 2nd drive was affected by speed. Granted most people can get away at ssd speeds and just crank quality lower until you don't glitch. That's entirely up to you whether the 2nd nvme speed constraints are acceptable.

I would also dual boot into an Ubuntu install running Kubernetes. 2nd drive had a dedicated ext4 partition to run my lab workloads.

I would have gone with a $100-150 x570 or waited for B550 if I'd stuck with ryzen.
 
MSI B450M Mortar / Mortar Titanium are good boards and have bios update capability even if they’re on old bios that doesn’t support 3rd gen. Mortar Max has support out of the box.

hard to find in the US without a huge markup but you can actually order them from Amazon UK with your US Amazon account. Shipping isn’t too bad either. I think I paid about $110 total for the Max version.

I’d be careful about doubting higher tdp processor in a “value” board though. Someone linked me a spreadsheet a while back, on google docs, that has an excellent comparison of available birds and what kind of power circuitry they have, including suggestions on which 3rd gen procs would be best supported by the power delivery. Super helpful if you’re thinking to go with a 3800x.


 
I've seen the same VRM chart. It seemed fine (at least according to that one) even with the 16 core with some cooling. I'm not a diminishing returns OCer.

I guess I'll go with this assuming no B550 announcements.

I don't see myself going to >8 cores on this, unless the market and software landscape dramatically changes. If I do an upgrade on this it would be to an 8 core Ryzen 4000 just to take advantage of the potential latency improvements.

The concerns I had with it were -

- Some reports of memory support issues (but there seems to be the anecdotal report on this for every board)

- NVMe placement. Although this was really a concern regarding next gen NVMe controllers ballooning in power requirements and requiring tall heatsinks based on initial PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives, but that seems like it was just a blip.

- Audio not really an upgrade, but the only option that had one was the Asus TUF.

- Would prefer an Intel NIC but no mATX boards seem to have it.
 
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