Review on ASUS TUF B450-PRO GAMING AM4 Motherboard

Greetings to all lovers of computer technology. In connection with the release of the new line of AMD Ryzen 3000 processors, there was a huge desire to switch from our old intel processor to the new Ryzen, namely the Ryzen 5 3600 model.

And of course, the first thing that arose was the choice and purchase of a reliable motherboard for this processor. After reading a lot of information on the Internet and looking at many reviews, I settled on a model from Asus, called the TUF B450-PRO GAMING.

The motherboard has a full-size ATX, made of thick black PCB with designer yellow accents and the TUF logo. A nice bonus is the small RGB backlight located at the bottom of the board under the yellow TUF GAMING bar.

Now I want to briefly go over the scope of delivery, technical specifications and capabilities of this board.

The order falls into the hands of the buyer in a cardboard box with a pleasant design. The only thing that bothered me was the lack of any seals, both on the box and on the package in which the board itself was directly located.

In addition to the board itself, the kit includes: a disk with drivers and utilities, company stickers, a certificate of reliability, a set of paper documentation, two SATA cables, a set of mounting screws for an M.2 format drive and a panel cover.

This motherboard is equipped with all the necessary and modern connectors for connecting the necessary components.

On board we have 6 SATA 6Gb/s connectors. Two ports for M.2 format drives. Two full-fledged PCI-E x16, one of which is reinforced, as well as 3 slots of PCI-E x1. Four DDR4 DIMM slots capable of dual channel operation. Socket for AM4 processor. Realtek ALCS1200A audio chip is responsible for the sound. Network Controller Realtek RTL8111A.

The interface panel is protected by a plastic casing, on it are located: connectors for connecting a DVI-D and HDMI monitor, LAN port, a connector for connecting old keyboards or a mouse, 3pcs 3.5 mm audio jack, 2 usb 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 3.1 ports and one USB Type-C port.

The main advantage of this board is the power system and its cooling. The processor power has an 8pin connector, the board itself is standard 24pin. The power subsystem uses a 4 + 2 real phase circuit made of quality components. Two massive radiators are responsible for cooling the VRM zone, which are tightly fixed with screws. The chipset is cooled by a massive aluminum plate, but it is already attached with plastic clips.

As a result, I got such an assembly on this board. A Ryzen 5 3600 processor, an Asus GTX 1080 STRIX graphics card, two Kingston Hyper X Predator memory modules with a clock frequency of 3200 MHz were installed. The power supply is responsible for the Cougar CMX unit at 1000 watts. CPU cooling, small turret from Zalman.

After a month of use, I want to share my general impressions with you, the motherboard is very worthy, I boldly put it 10 out of 10. The build quality is at the highest level, all components are soldered just perfect, it inspires confidence. The warranty on this product is 3 years. You can undoubtedly say that this is one of the best models on the B450 chipset, the board is suitable for both conservative people like me who just want to install hardware and use a computer stably, and for enthusiasts who like to experiment with overclocking and get the most out of their pc. If you want a reliable gaming base on the Ryzen processor and don’t want to overpay for more expensive chipsets like the X470/X570 then this is definitely your choice. Of the minuses, one can only note the lack of the ability to update the BIOS without installing a processor, but I was lucky and the board came with a fresh BIOS version that already supports the new generation Ryzen processors, so the system started up without problems.

And finally, I want to give you a little advice, there are 4 motherboard models in the Asus B450 TUF GAMING line, two of them are PRO versions (B450 and B450M) and two PLUS versions are the same (B450 and B450M) so I recommend buying exclusively PRO version, as PLUS uses a simpler power and cooling system, which will not allow you to safely engage in overclocking. Thank you all for your attention.

The article is written on the basis of materials of this site.