Asrock B450M Pro4-F AMD Motherboard

Asrock B450M Pro4-F AMD Motherboard

Asrock B450M Pro4-F AMD Motherboard A powerful tool that combines the speed of your SSD with the capacity of your hard disk into a single, fast, easy-to-manage drive. SSDs are fast, but expensive, and offer minimal capacity. Mechanical hard drives boast large capacity for a low price, but are much slower than an SSD. AMD StoreMI technology “combines” these two types of storage into a single drive and automatically moves the data you access the most to the SSD, so you get the best of both worlds: SSD responsiveness, and mechanical hard disk capacity. You can also use up to 2GB of RAM as a last-level cache for ultra-fast data. Dual M.2 For SSD Equipped with M.2 slot that supports both SATA3 6Gb/s and PCIe Gen3 x4 Ultra M.2 interface that pushes data transfer speeds up to 32Gb/s, and is compatible with ASRock’s U.2 Kit for installing some of the world’s fastest U.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 SSD.

Asrock B450M Pro4-F Review

ASRock has a new value MATX board with the latest B450 chipset from AMD; it’s got everything you need and nothing you don’t. The ASRock B450M Pro4 MATX motherboard has all the essentials. There are plenty of ports on the back and a PS/2 port for those with old school peripherals. You’ll find 4 SATA ports and 2 M.2 slots for storage, RGB headers for aesthetics and gigabit Ethernet for connectivity. Whilst the audio is the Realtek ALC892 codec and not the ALC1220 we see on ‘gaming’ products it’s still going to be good enough for all but the most hardcore of gamers and it fits the price point well. For aesthetics there are two RGB headers and an addressable LED header to suit LED coolers and lighting strips. All 4 of the fan headers are in logical places – circled on the photo below. The VRM heatsinks look large enough to be effective and we didn’t notice any issues or excessive heat when testing the overclocking capabilities with our Ryzen 5 2600 CPU. It’s good to see two M.2 slots on the board for solid state storage;one is NVME/SATA and the other is pure SATA M.2 and shares lanes with the SATA_3 port. We also see a USB 3.1 Gen 1 front panel header, two USB 2.0 headers along with four SATA 3 connectors. If you were to pair this board with a Ryzen 2200G or 2400G APU you would be able to use the VGA, DVI and HDMI ports on the back (either individually or all at once for 3 screens). We’ve seen that those APUs can be quite effective when it comes to entry-level gaming and this is an upper entry-level board. At the time of review, the pricing hasn’t been released but if this comes in at the same price or similar to the ASRock AB350M Pro it could well be a bargain as it essentially has everything a gamer needs. Aside from the second full-length PCIE slot being 4X, there don’t seem to be many obvious compromises for mid-range or upper entry-level builders. This offering from ASRock effectively allows gamers to focus their budget on a decent CPU and graphics card by shaving some cost off the motherboard.