ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F Gaming Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

The ASUS RoG STRIX B450-F Gaming is available from today for around £122. That’s a pretty decent price given the level of features and the design of the motherboard. The X470 version of this motherboard, which packs a few extra features is just under £200. That’s a saving of £70 to £80, and that’s not an insignificant amount of money to keep in your wallet either. The older B350-F is now £104.99, so it’s worth paying up that extra little bit for the newer B450 chipset without a doubt.

Overview

The latest motherboard from ASUS ticks all the right boxes for a those building a new gaming PC. Not only does it offer performance that can go head to head with the best X470 motherboards, it does it at a much more reasonable price too. However, it’s not as simple as you might think, as the B450 chipset may be a little bit limited for some more advanced users, albeit not that many.

Performance

When it comes down to it, the benchmarks are pretty interesting. The B450 and the X470 chipsets appear to perform pretty similarly. However, while I could hit 4.2 GHz on my CPU with this motherboard, if I were doing so 24/7, I’d likely still invest in a more robust X470 chipset, as they’re designed to be a more focused overclocking motherboard. However, for most users, XFR2 does an amazing job of pushing performance levels closer to that than ever before, so long as you have adequate cooling on your CPU. We used a Noctua NH-D15S and it worked very well indeed.

Connectivity

This is about where the bulk of the differences seem to reside for these motherboards. They’ve trimmed the fat off to cut the costs, while still leaving enough features for the mass market. The higher spec X470 can offer up more USB ports, a few more headers, some additional capacitors to help with CPU and memory overclocking stability, and an M.2 heat shield. Stripping most of that away still leaves you enough meat on the bone to build a fantastic gaming PC though. Of course, with dual M.2, six SATA ports, and a few USB ports, the B450 is hardly lacking.

Should I Buy One?

If you’re already running a B450, X370 or even an X470 motherboard, there’s obviously little need to change now. However, if you’re upgrading now to a Ryzen Gen 2 CPU and want to save a bit of cash, the B450 currently offers the most bang for buck in the market for Ryzen. Much cheaper than X470 while still retaining the same stylish aesthetics and easy overclocking make B450 a safe bet for any system builder.