ASRockATX Motherboard (B450 PRO4)

I paid $89 + tax for this motherboard 07/2020 and so far so good. I paired it with a Ryzen 3600, 16gb of 3200MHz Crucial RAM, and a Silicon Valley 256gb NVMe. This was an upgrade for me, not a new build; as I already had a GTX 970, PSU, case, CD-Rom, and storage hard drives. I paid $390 shipped w/ tax included for the new stuff. What an upgrade. I've never owned an ASRock product before, but have heard of them. My motherboard had a sticker on the box that it was "Ryzen 3000 Series Ready" and I did not have to flash the BIOS (July, 2020). Total disassembly through reassembly + windows install was an hour and a half.It's simple, and cheap. I mostly browse YouTube but also casually play CSGO and COD so I wanted a PC upgrade that could handle both max settings, but for a decent price. I never dip below 200fps in CSGO 1920x1080 max settings and COD @ Max settings I get around 60fps. I can lower the settings and get well over 100fps without any dips. There are a ton of graphics options with COD.I use the Ryzen Master software in Windows to Auto-OC my 3600 to 4.2GHz. It's stable even with the stock cooler; it never gets over 70C under load. Idles around 45C. I'll be picking up a Hyper 212+ soon enough. I've had a Hyper on my previous build for 10 years and it worked really well to keep temps down; so I'll be doing it again. It's common sense that the lower your temps, the better the lifespan of the hardware. Just like a car engine. So buy an aftermarket cooler. I'm no overclocking expert and the Ryzen software really makes it simple. I always hated figuring out voltages, etc in the BIOS like I'm some computer programmer lol. The Ryzen software also stress tests the OC for you, which is neat.I did have to overclock the RAM in the BIOS settings though, as it defaulted to 2000MHz; but changing the speed was as simple as clicking the 3200MHz option and off we go. Recognized as 3200MHz w/ CPU-Z and Task Manager. Took 2 minutes.Also, as another reviewer posted, the NVME drives share the same lanes as two of the SATA ports.. so if you have an excessive number of SATA disk or SSD drives your NVME's will not show in device manager or elsewhere. The nice part of this mobo is that it has TWO NVME ports instead of just one. Lots of higher priced boards only have one slot.This setup POSTed first shot and I was up and running in windows within 30 min using a bootable flash drive. The bios is simple enough to navigate, and is nothing fancy. Set the boot priority and boot order and you're good to go. Onboard sound works fine. My 10 year old mobo was just as simple so I wasn't expecting anything fancy, especially for the price. I wanted a budget upgrade. I've never built an AMD rig before, but these Ryzen 3600 processors are monsters for the price. So happy I went with it. Coming from an i7 860 w/ 8gb of 1200MHz RAM and an ASUS P7P55D-E Pro mobo. I hope to get another 10 years out of this setup.Word of advice is DO NOT enable the "quick boot" option in the BIOS as it allows no way to get back into the BIOS without resetting the CMOS. I did it just to try it, and then had to jump the CMOS with a screwdriver to reset the BIOS. Just be forewarned it's a P.I.T.A. The battery is located under the graphics card so the screwdriver method was the best optionI'll update the review if anything catastrophic happens, Lol. Been 4 days so far. No crashes, no hiccups. Just smoooooth sailing at a decent price. Say a couple hail Mary's for me-------------------------------------EDIT UPDATE: 12/5/2020Computer still running strong. I put a Hyper Evo 212+ on the processor and it never goes above 55c under load in COD or CSGO. It's insane. 4.2GHz OC'd and never reaches 60C? You kiddin me? Arctic Silver 5 is always keyNo crashes thus far. Added another 1TB Silicon Power NVMe to store CSGO and COD on. Pretty unreal how fast this PC is for so cheap.OC has been stable no problemo. Hours of gaming.

Easy to install works well. good upgrade for older ryzen7 processor. Not a lot of flair but works well.

works great with a Ryzen 5 2600x and a (2x8GB) 16GB Crucial Balistix Sport LT 2400mhz (SR)Most of the Bios settings were already where I wanted them, the only things I had to do was turn off Onboard Audio and the Com Port, and set the correct Boot Order for the Optical Drive and OS driveOne thing I did however run into was one of my SSD's weren't running at the proper speed because ports SATA 3 and 4 share the speed of the Bottom M2 slot, so if your SSD is underpeforming just move it to a different port and it will solve the problem.Overall a great motherboard for the price

I bought this motherboard November 2018 as a Black Friday deal for $75. And it was worth the price. It's 2020 and it's still going strong. The colors are correct, temperatures on the VRMs look find (I say this with a Ryzen 5 3600 overclocked), and it supports 1 m.2 nvme ssd and 1 m.2 SATA ssd.What isn't strong is the fact that it doesn't support load line calibration, meaning that you will need to make the voltage higher so that under heavy workload it gets the correct voltage; otherwise it will reboot due to not having enough voltage. Another con is that... there isn't enough fan headers on the motherboard to connect 2 more chassis fans.

I decided to use this board and a Ryzen 1700 as the backbone for my 4U rack mounted network attached storage server. It supports ECC-DDR4 memory and that was important for this application. It can be tricky to find ECC memory that is on the QVL for this board but some searching in online forums will give you some additional options that also work. I'm using a pair of Samsung 8x2 and they work perfectly with this board and the Ryzen 1700. Everything worked on first boot and I have no issues using a PCIe x1 SATA controller card, PCIe x4 network adapter, PCIe x16 GTX 750Ti, and a SATA M.2 drive together on this board with FreeNAS. It's a great, no frills, budget board that I hope continues to serve me well for years to come.

Found this to be a very versatile board. Has 2 PCI x16 slots. Has 2 NVME slots. Though can only use up to Gen 3 NVME. Does not support Gen 4 NVME. Has 5 eSata ports, 2 shared with NVME slots. If using the 2 NVME slots, will lose 2 eSata ports. Has 2 PCI x 8 slots. Has ARPG plugs. Plus has all the other ports and slots normally found on boards. The versatility gives a wide amount of build choices. Overall a solid board at a reasonable price. Would definitely recommend this board.

Perfect B450 motherboard in my honest opinion. Couldn't be happier. I knew I was going ASRock thanks to my previous FM2 motherboard from them. The UEFI was my favorite part and it's 100x better now and packed with features. Also one of the easiest to update. I'd absolutely recommend this motherboard to anyone who doesn't need an intense overclock. Not to discredit ASRock, but the B450 chipset is simply subpar compared to the X470 in overclocking and VRMs. If I needed that, I would've gone for one of ASRock's boards still. Paired with my Ryzen 5 2600, this board is exactly what I needed and supremely affordable for quality and features it provides.