AORUS B450 Pro Motherboard Review

AORUS B450 The new generation of AMD's motherboards is here at last. While there's not much in the way of "new" tech on this launch, it does look like it'll be tackling an important mid-budget price bracket for the market. With all the experience they've gained from their X370 and B350 motherboards, it looks like they'll be merging the two into B450. What that means is plenty of high-end features, support for 2000 series Ryzen CPUs and all their respective features, overclocking and more. Furthermore, it's basically almost all the features of a high-end X470 solution at a much more competitive price. Of course, for high-end overclockers, those pushing their hardware to more extremes, X470 is still an appealing option. However, for the vast majority of those building gaming rigs at home, B450 is more than likely everything you'll need. Features Supports AMD 2nd Generation Ryzen™/ Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics/ 1st Generation Ryzen™ Processors Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs HDMI, DVI-D Ports for Multiple Display Integrated I/O Shield of Ultra Durable™ Design Dual Ultra-Fast NVMe PCIe Gen3 M.2 (x4, x2) with Dual Thermal Guards ALC1220-VB Enhanced 114dB(Rear) / 110dB(Front) SNR in Microphone with WIMA Audio Capacitors RGB FUSION with Multi-Zone LED Light Show Design, Supports Digital LED & RGB LED Strips Intel® GbE LAN with cFosSpeed Internet Accelerator Software Smart Fan 5 Features 6 Temperature Sensors and 5 Hybrid Fan Headers with FAN STOP APP Center Including EasyTune™ and Cloud Station™ Utilities CEC 2019 Ready, Save Power with a Single Click Specifications For in-depth specifications, please visit the official AORUS product page here. What AORUS Had to Say "AORUS 400-series motherboards use Hybrid Digital PWM + Lower RDS(on) MOSFETs design to support the 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ processors by offering incredible precision in developing power of the motherboard’s most power-hungry and energy-sensitive components as well as delivering enhanced system performance and ultimate hardware scalability." - Aorus What's in the Box Everything you need is here, including all the required SATA cables, I/O adaptor, and of course, a chassis sticker. You get a driver CD, which is pointless as you'll want to download the lastest anyway. A Closer Look My first impressions of this motherboard are pretty darn good. I mean, it's fairly hard to tell this much apart from any other high-end Aorus motherboard and it certainly looks like the more affordable B-series has taken a step up in the hardware leagues. It looks like the Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi, albeit one that's been stripped down a little bit, because it has been. However, plenty of goodies still remain for you to enjoy. The VRM is a little smaller on the B450 range, but with the newer Ryzen chips using less power, this isn't as big of a problem as it may seem. Furthermore, they're hardly small VRM coolers either, and more than up to the job of maintaining higher overclocks. Power Delivery The board uses a Hybrid Digital PWM design. You'll also notice the rear I/O shroud is enlarged, giving the motherboard a cool design that flows together nicely. The socket is the standard AM4 design, ready for stock coolers out of the box. Of course, you can remove that for an aftermarket solution if desired. Unlike the X470 range, there are no RGB lights or armour on the DIMM slots. However, you do still get four slots, so plenty of room for lots of RAM. Or you could match it up with that lovely Aorus RAM that comes with two dummy modules too. Located here, you'll also find a D_LED header, as well as two SATA connections. Further down the board, four more SATA connections, giving us six in total, as well as a USB 3.0 header. M.2 Mounts Storage options get a big boost here too, with the inclusion of two M.2 drive mounts, each with Thermal Guards. Of course, they'll support NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 and X2 drives in RAID, as well as configurations that use AMD Store MI software. The audio hardware is reassuringly robust too, offering the fantastic ALC1220-VB chipset, high-end audio capacitors, and WIMA Audio capacitors. The end result here is high-quality, powerful, and distortion free sound. While the motherboard has RGB lighting on the audio trace, rear I/O guard, and chipset cover, it also has another D_LED header here, as well as a 12v GRBW header. Make sure you use the right one though, or you can break your lighting as they use different voltages. On the rear, the guard is built into the motherboard. To see this on a non-flagship motherboard is fantastic, as it looks super clean and professional. There's not a vast amount of ports here, as per the limitations of the chipset. However, it's pretty competent for most system builds. I'm happy to see an optical out included too, which is handy for some high-end gaming headsets. How We Test Testing Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to our benchmarks in our reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Remember that your choice of motherboard, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using any software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Testing Your Own System Links are provided below, as well as the settings we use. We encourage you to not just look at how one product compares to any other, but how it compares to your own. If you're looking to build a new system, you should benchmark your current PC using our benchmarks and settings where possible. You should then look at the percentage improvement from your current hardware to the hardware we tested to give you a ballpark figure of how much an upgrade this will provide you with. Intel Testbenches Z370 Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Intel Core i7-8700K RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X299 Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Intel Core i9-7900X RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit B360 Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Intel Core i7-8700K RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AMD Testbenches X399 (Threadripper) Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Threadripper 1950X RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X470 Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Ryzen 7 2700X RAM - G.Skill 3400MHz Dual Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X370 Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Ryzen 7 1800X RAM - GeIL DDR4 2977MHz Dual Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit B450 Motherboard – Changes Per Review CPU – Ryzen 7 2700X RAM - G.Skill 3400MHz Dual Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Games and Settings Used All games are tested on a 60 Hz display with V-Sync off for all tests. Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark PCMark 10 Professional (download) Express Benchmark WPrime (download) 32M and 1024M Power usage recorded at 1024M 50% complete, thermals recorded at 75% complete CineBench R15 (download) CPU Multi CPU Single Handbrake (download) Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below) AIDA64 Engineer (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps, and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Other Notes A rest period of 2-5 minutes is observed between each piece of software allowing the system to return to its idle power usage and temperatures. Background services like Windows Update are checked to not be running during the testing period by setting WiFi to Metered Connection. Updates All games, graphics card drivers, BIOS, Windows and everything else is always kept up to date with the latest available. Older benchmarks may not be retested until stated otherwise. However, all hardware will be tested with the best and latest firmware and software available to that hardware at the time of review. As of 1st of May 2018, all hardware was retested on their latest drivers. Anything after this date will again be using their most recent versions available to them. Thanks Thank you to Noctua, Crucial, ASUS, Gigabyte, Lian-Li, be quiet!, OCZ, for providing the hardware that helps makes these tests possible! Synthetic Benchmarks The new B450 motherboards feature hardware that's surprisingly similar to that of the X470 motherboards, albeit with a few tweaks to the connectivity options. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the performance closely matches that of the X470 counterparts, especially since we're using the same CPU as per those reviews. Scoring 20801 in 3DMark and 5538 in Unigine, we're only falling a tiny amount behind X470 here. PCMark 10 Express actually scored higher than our X470 benchmarks too. In WPrime, X470 saw a small advantage over our time of 99.825 seconds, but not by much. The same is also true for Cinebench, which scored a solid 1802, pretty much what one would expect from this CPU in any motherboard. 3DMark Firestrike Unigine Superposition PCMark 10 Express WPrime Cinebench R15 Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K Power Consumption Overclocking We had no issues hitting the 4.2 GHz we knew our CPU was capable of, meaning we were able to squeeze a little extra performance from our system. The XFR2 technology does an amazing job of getting close to this performance on its own, so long as you have a good cooler. However, at the tradeoff of higher power usage, you can lock the frequency to something higher like we did. This saw a score of 20801 in 3DMark, which is pretty competitive. WPrime 1024 time dropped from 99.825 to 92.01, and Cinebench increased from 1802 to 1885. Not a huge leap up, but every little counts when it comes to rendering times. 3DMark Firestrike WPrime Cinebench R15 Gaming Performance Gaming performance was as you would expect, pretty much falling just behind, in-between or ahead of the X470 solutions from game to game. Gamers may be tempted to invest in X470 for extra performance, but it's clearly not that much different. We scored 186 FPS in Rise of the Tomb Raider, and 106.6 FPS in Deus Ex, which is pretty decent. For the more demanding Ghost Recon and Far Cry tests, scores were near average for all the motherboards we've tested, scoring 132.2 and 120 respectively. Rise of the Tomb Raider Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Ghost Recon: Wildlands Far Cry Primal Final Thoughts How Much Does it Cost? Unfortunately, the prices for this motherboard weren't live at the time of writing. However, we will update this as soon as possible. The motherboards launch today, and my guess is that this one will be around £120, putting it in line with the pricing of their rivals products. With X470's high-end boards costing around £200 on average, B450 is poised to be a great value for money solution for anyone investing in a Ryzen CPU. Overview There's not really anything to complain about when it comes to the latest Aorus motherboard. It's got all the performance we would want from a high-end Ryzen CPU, and at a price that's set to be much more affordable than the flagship X470 chipset motherboards. Sure, Aorus has trimmed the fat while leaving plenty of core features that you would want in your next gaming PC. Performance Enthusiast overclockers who are going to be pushing way past 4 GHz 24/7 and ragging their CPU hard may still want to look at X470. B450 isn't an enthusiast overclocking solution and lacks some of the extra hardware and software to push the limits. However, for your day-to-day gamer who just wants to dial up the multiplier and voltages to get a few extra FPS, it's got more than enough features for that level of overclocking. Plus with XFR2 and the latest Ryzen Gen 2 CPUs, overclocking is less of a necessity than ever before. Aorus's Smart Fan 5, a bank of 6 temperature sensors, and hybrid fan headers (with fan stop) will ensure you get the airflow your system needs, and the silence you need, when you need them most. Connectivity So a few features are stripped away, but there's certainly more than enough left over. Fewer USB ports here or there isn't going to cause many headaches for you. With six SATA ports and a pair of NVMe compatible M.2 drive mounts, you'll find more than enough storage solutions. Of course, with their dual thermal guards, RAID support, and Store MI support, getting the best out of your storage devices should be a breeze too. For audio, I'm very happy to see the ALC1220 chipset included. It's a well proven and much loved audio chipset that wouldn't look out of place on a board twice as expensive. For those hooking up powerful headphones and speakers, you'll have no concerns here. Finally, the integration of the rear I/O guard is awesome. This was once a feature for the flagship motherboards, and it's great to see it filter down into more affordable solutions. Should I Buy One? If you've been saving up for a £200+ high-end X470 motherboard for your next gaming rig, ask yourself, do you really need it? Are you fussed about not having extensive overclocking settings, as many people aren't? If you just want great all-around performance, and you don't need excessive amounts of USB ports, then you're not missing out on anything with B450. It's cheaper, but the motherboard looks just as good as its more expensive big brothers. Highly recommended for anyone looking to take a leap into the world of Ryzen.