ASUS, ASRock, and Gigabyte B450 motherboards are now available in etail. The boards seem to hover in a 80~90 euro price region and are compatible with both last years Ryzen, as well as the new Ryzen 2000 series processors.
From the looks of it, the boards could offer some great value. The AM4 socket based motherboards will mostly have four DDR4 memory slots and one a m.2 SSD (NVMe compatible) connector. Gigabyte offers the B450M DS3H has since surfaced for about 80 euros. ASUS release just over seven board, starting at roughly 70 EUR, ASRock offers one, at roughly 90 EUR. AMD B450 is a lower classed (budget) Ryzen chipset, where the X470 chipset is going to support SLI , B450 does not (but does support Crossfire). The B450 will be a more budget aimed choice, which makes a lot of sense. Please notice that you will get your standard 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes pulled from the Ryzen processor. Ryzen all by itself has 24 PCI-Express lanes, 4 are being used to interface with the B450 or X470 chipset (which adds Gen 2.0 lanes as shown in the table). So depending on the chipset used it adds a number of gen 2.0 PCIe lanes through the chipset.
 |
|||||||
| X470 | X370 | B450 | B350 | A320 | X300 / B300 / A300 | Ryzen CPU | |
| PCIe 3.0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 20 |
| PCIe 2.0 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbit/s) | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| USB 3.0 | 6 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| USB 2.0 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| SATA 6 Gbit / s | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| SATA or NVME Raid | 0/1/10 | 0/1/10 | 0/1/10 | 0/1/10 | 0/1/10 | 0/1 | – |
| Overclocking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | – | X300 Yes | – |
| CrossFire / SLI | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes | Yes / – | Yes / – | – | – | – |
Each chipset will add select numbers of USB ports, the Ryzen processor also offers four native USB 3.1 ports. There is support for RAID 0/1/10 configurations both SATA and now NVME as well as overclocking support on the X470 and B450 chipset. B450 will also support enhanced XFR2. Obviously, the motherboard partners could add 3rd party chips to increase USB 3.0 and so on.
We have the first samples inbound and will start offering reviews soon.
Update – communication seems rather foggy at the moment, there should still be a sales embargo in effect. The review embargo will be lifted later this month, but considering we see retail and e-tail availability and the listing of B450 boards, that could change anytime. We’ll keep you posted and will go live with reviews one we get a thumbs up from AMD.
