20 Best Am3+ Motherboard For The Money (2023 Updated)

chose this board because they had one open box in the store which brought the price down dramatically to the amount i was wanting to spend on a MoBo for a 5900X & a liquid cooled Sapphire Toxic 6900xt build.

didnt wanna go cheap on the mobo or crazy expensive i felt she fit the happy medium i was searching for but this open box saved my booty and gave me the extra cash needed for the 2TB crucial m. 2 ssd that i stuck in this bad boy.

All in all really great and quiet board aesthetically pleasing as well, clear cmos button on the back which i love for overclocking my components, insane amount of m. 2 ports and sata connections. i have never been a fan of MSI and this is my first MSI board ever i dont regret my decision especially for a open box with everything and i mean everythign! still included in the box (RARE) lol but! MSI has some of the worst software and rgb software to date basically bloatware in my eyes i deleted it all after exploring it.

fans can be adjusted in bios or with 3rd party software so none of its needed or helpful in my opinion maybe just changing the rgb on the board if your into all that rainbow stuff but another big selling point of the board is it has a RGB light switch on the bottom of the board which enables you to just turn off all the extra rgb instantly without no software needed (only the rgb on the board nothing else) which i have never encountered before.

the MoBo comes with a LOT of extras in the box as well and some actually cool and usable extras at that, some screwdriver key chains a 16Gb MSI thumb stick with all the drivers and recovery info on it that also can hang from a key chain and this extra dope little two headed brush for cleaning the dust off the electronics that when not being used slide into the frame of the brush.

i know i know lol but its the little things that get me lol. if you can get an open box or find it on sale the board is definitely worth it then.

It’s clear the board has all the bells and whistles a person would want or need but I was really impressed by the power phase design. Independent, powerful phases on a platform using high end components is something to appreciate.

But what does it mean? Exactly what I was hoping for. I am coming from the Asus X570 Dark Hero platform which I have been tuning on for quite some time. It’s held up faithfully during that time and has been a great board.

I was on the fence with testing either this board or the Asus Extreme X570S E-atx board and decided to choose this one first to give a try because of its lower cost. In both power and efficiency this design is nicely improved over my Dark Hero and while I would have liked to play with the Asus Extreme, I can confidently say that this is great performance for the cost.

Delivering clean power is the name of the game for these high-end motherboards with overclocking, and this is no slouch. I have been able to achieve greater ram stability with lower ram timing, lower SOC and lower Vdimm Voltages.

The lower temperatures came with that, and I certainly have no complaints. On top of this I have been able to achieve greater CPU stability including maintaining my manual overclock settings at lower voltages than the Dark Hero and, in turn, lower temperatures by a good margin.

My Benchmarking scores are all improved (both GPU and CPU) and more consistent. In-game frames have improved aswell in their consistency. I’m still fine tuning the system to see how efficient this platform can be and after about a week of tuning I have to say I’m impressed at how much overhead was made available.

I love MSI’s load-line calibration options and coupled with extended switching frequency option, the fine-tuning capability is really impressive! Great to see a quality build and quality components. Just handling the board screams high-end with the sheer weight of it.

I was impressed by how well-built the dark hero was compared to other offerings in the past, but this new Ace Max is something else. I currently hold a hardware record on Timespy with my set-up using only AIO’s (take that custom loops and ln2!) But it won’t take long to finalize tuning on this platform and I expect to push it even higher.

But it’s clear to me that any enthusiast can take advantage of the inherent efficient design of this board since Ryzen’s stock configuration holds core boost relative to temperature and stability. And a nice bonus is it looks good.

The MSI Dragon symbol is slick and looks good with quality and detail. I was thinking it might not look as good as the Dark Hero or the Asus Extreme E-atx board, but I was pleasantly surprised. If you’re on the fence with this board, take the plunge.

I think it’s worth it.

I’ve had a few different makes of motherboards over the last 9 years, ASRock, Gigabyte and Asus. Initially they set up was Intel based until I switched over to AMD with a Gigabyte Aorus Z570 Master. This was fine for approx.

18 months until one morning itg failed to boot up. Try as I might , check connects, remove and re-seat components, nothing. It was retuned under warranty and repaired. This got me thinking, did I want this motherboard now or should I build a new rig.

I decided on a new build. I wanted a motherboard that was an AM4, had support for more than 3 PCIe 4 x 4 M. 2 sockets , had plenty of fan headers, preferably 4 pin PWM. I also required Turbo USB 3. 2 Gen 2 , USB 3.

2 Gen 1. Preferably an integrated I/O back cover and definitely no small cooling fan on the actual motherboard in the lower right-hand corner. Some might say this would be a bit of a tall order. I did my research on the internet and came up with a couple of possibilities.

The Aorus X570S Master and the MSI MEG X570S ACE MAX. I had my doubts about going for an Aorus Master again the MSI MEG X570S ACE MAX offered everything that the Aorus X570S Master did, and then some.

e. g The M. 2 add-in PCIe 4 card namely the M. 2 Xpander-Z Gen 4S supporting an additional 2 M. 2 ssd. That’s a total of 6 M. 2 ssd at Gen 4 speeds. That did have an in-built fan, so I’m not sure if I’ll use it.

(I like my rigs to be ultra quiet). With regard to in-built audio on the motherboard, that was not an issue since I use an external DAC/Headphone amp, namely the iFi Zen DAC V2. So, the winner, the MSI MEG X570S ACE MAX, a superb motherboard, full of features, inputs and outputs, fan headers.

It has an excellent build quality including the back. MSI have not skimped on materials or traded off one or two features in order to keep costs down. The bios is easy enough to work around, I had no problems with it whatsoever.

When I purchased it, the bios did not require an update, it was fine straight out of the box. I’ve had the motherboard some 5 months now, I’m really pleased with it and have had no issues whatsoever with it.

Would I recommend this motherboard to anyone else, most definitely, without hesitation. It’s all you could wish for in a motherboard and then some, furthermore, it is very reasonably priced.

I’ve been running this motherboard for several weeks with a Ryzen 9 5900x, 64GB Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black (3600), NVIDIA RTX 2070 and 2TB Seagate Firecuda 530 NVMe Gen 4. 0 SSD. System it totally stable at stock speeds and RAM in XMP profile at 3,600Mhz; it sailed through a single pass in Memtest86 but mainly has run some very demanding games for many hours with no crashes, which were prone to fail on my previous system with even very small instabilities at higher speeds.

Wi-Fi is connected but I have not used it yet as my system is connected via Ethernet cable. I do not use onboard audio chips as I have a dedicated sound card, which usually always provides far superior sound quality, noticeable by almost anyone, even without a trained ear.

I have no experience using sleep mode on this board, as I stopped using this on my old system after finding Gigabyte boards were prone to crashing when combining XMP RAM profiles with sleep mode, regardless of voltage settings and having all the latest BIOS updates.

Not a fan of the UEFI BIOS layout: seems like far less options for timings compared with my previous motherboard, and it seems like a pain to navigate the menus already; hardly the end of the world though and it may be improved once I install the latest BIOS updates, as it is still on the factory firmware.

Have been very happy with the board so far, as it offered the specs I wanted while keeping down unecessary extra costs for features like SLI or 5Gb/s Ethernet, which I would not see any benefit from.

Main reason for my upgrade was actually just to get NVMe Gen 4. 0, which I have seen significant speed benefits from.

I have recently switched to AMD Ryzen 5 3600x, after some issues with my Intel CPU. The MSI( B450 Tomahawk Max came highly recommended on forums, with experts focusing on the strong VRM for a B450 board and good VRM cooling.

Pros: + Tomahawk “Max” version has a 32Mb BIOS. It will be able to support all the past and future CPUs (Ryzen 4000 is coming out in fall of 2020, some b450 board that have 16MB bios will have to “chose” which older CPUs they will support if switching to the new Ryzens BIOS.

This one most probably will support all of them) + BIOS-flashback function with a button on the IO shield area. This means unbrickable BIOS and possibly flashing back and forth between older and newer BIOSes.

Thus Ryzen 4000 BIOS upgrade will be “unilateral” (non-revertable) as AMD said – well, not on this board, I think. This one has the BIOS-flashback and in my experience that will allow flashing older BIOSes back, if interested.

Since the BIOS on this particular board might support all Ryzen generations, that’s just a precaution. Still = unbrickable bios. + Good 4+2 phase VRM, capable of overclocking even a 3950x (with serious airflow over the VRM) + Large and efficient VRM heatsink covering the IO area + Very good performance with my RAM XPG 3600CL17 – I can easily drop the timings to 15-16.

I have recently tested this memory with one of the latest Intel “K” CPUs on another board and it couldn’t run even at XMP settings properly. This MSI b450 T Max board’s BIOS was ironed out and has no issues with the memory at this point.

In fact it outperformed that intel z490 board. Cons: – SATA ports 5 and 6 do not work even with the most current BIOS – a problem reported by a few users! I moved my two mirrored HDDs to ports 3 and 4 and solved the issue, but two practically dead ports is not ok in my book.

– No Addressable RGB header! I had an AIO with a hub that connects only to an A-RGB header and was out of luck. I cannot control the RGTB via software, but the AIO has a separate remote, so there is that.

Some people report using a 12v to 5v RGB converter (with some complaining of burnt cables) or another hub that can do the conversion. – Board layout could be better – the Front Panel connectors are located in the middle-lower part, a bit of a stretch for some cases.

– RGB software control only available via Dragon Center, which installs other bloatware too. The Dragon Center recognized both the RGB strip on the motherboard (sort of “under” the RAM area) and my XPG RGB ram, but only if there is no XPG software already installed.

It did not recognize my Power Color Red Devil rx5700 (flashed to XT). RGB integration is an issue for all vendors, it’s not an MSI specific issue, but it’s good to know, I think. I ended up with my AIO rgb being controlled by remote, as there is not ARGTB header and had to install another software for my GPU.

– Audio amplification is not as good as one of the main competitors. Neutral: ~ the BIOS takes getting used to. Conclusion: with all its minuses, this is a very solid board in terms of the quality and looks.

I assume it will be able to drive Ryzen 4000 without a problem – the MSI b550 Bazooka has the exact same VRM, so that’s your proof. For $20 discount when you bundle this motherboard with a CPU, I got it for $95.

That’s a killer price from Microcenter! I’d say it’s a must buy.

Choosing a motherboard can be tricky given you have to consider form factor, features, etc. The MSI Tomahawk MAX, however, is one of the most highly reviewed B450 boards, which is what made me interested in it.

It is not hard to see why. It is very affordable (Around $105 for me, since I purchased a Ryzen CPU with it), and it also performs very well. It has a good VRM and good power delivery for a mid-tier build.

It has a single M. 2 slot in the center, and has plenty of fan and rgb headers that are easy to access. The BIOS is very easy to navigate, just click XMP to get your RAM up to its highest frequency (the board supports up to around 4000 mghz RAM).

The top of the board, where it says ‘Arsenal Gaming’ even has a channel to hide your cpu fan cable. As far as looks go, it is an all black and grey board, so it will look good with just about everything.

The only lights it has are a set of about 8 or so LED’s on the back the board that light up red by default, but can be changed to different colors and settings through MSI Mystic Light! You can also turn off the rgb lighting completely through the app if you prefer.

The io shield is not attached, but was not too hard to install on my case. Overall, this was the perfect B450 mobo for my first build, and I am very happy with it.

I usually upgrade my PC every 12 months, and I generally spend a few weeks looking at reviews and feedback or products before I buy them. After reading hundreds of articles, I eventually decided on the MSI Tomahawk Max for my Ryzen 3600X build.

I was originally looking at the more premium MSI X570 Gaming Carbon, however the price difference is big, and the features on the Tomahawk are more than enough for my needs at the moment. I don’t usually cut costs on motherboards, my last couple of boards have been close to the £200 mark, however this time around my budget was a little lower than usual.

First impressions are that this is much more premium board than its £90 price tag would imply. The packaging is solid, the board is well protected inside, there’s a decent manual, a CD with drivers (although I feel a USB key would better these days) and the board itself looks great.

I didn’t want a fancy RGB board as I was looking to keep costs down for this build. There is some LED lighting on the Tomahawk – but not too much, so if that’s what you’re looking for, maybe look at something else in the MSI range.

The board itself is a sleek gunmetal grey colour, with some nice chunky heatsinks. It looks very ‘military’, which is in keeping with the product being named after the Tomahawk missile. Connectivity is good – 6 SATA connections, plenty of system fan points, and M.

2 socket which is important to me as that’s where I’ll be running my games from. My system contains 3 x SSD, 1 x mechanical drive and an M. 2 drive, it’s not in a large case, and yet I found the motherboard very easy to work with – it’s very well-spaced out, and the important connectors are situated in thoughtful places to allow for easy cable management.

I’m using a Corsair H100i for CPU cooling and it fits beautifully on the board – the pre-installed cooler mounts are perfect for it. On the rear I/O panel there’s a Flash BIOS button which is a great addition (it saved the day earlier today!).

The BIOS itself is really good as well – A full-featured GUI with decent overclocking options. For me personally, the product’s strengths are: Decent layout Great connectivity Well priced Good looks If I had to pick one criticism, it’s that the 4 x SATA ports could be moved a bit lower.

My graphics card (Radeon RX 5700 XT) pushes down on them, as a result I had to unplug 2 of them and move them to the 2 sockets at the bottom of the board because the RX 5700 was causing them to drop out.

However, this was only a minor niggle for me. I did have some trouble flashing the BIOS today – it repeatedly froze on a blank screen after flashing. I reset a few times and no joy, however the Flash BIOS button on the board rescued things! Using the button and a USB stick, I was able to roll back to a previous BIOS version and everything was fine.

I would highly recommend this motherboard to anyone looking to build a Ryzen system on a budget. You really won’t be disappointed.

This board is a updated MSI Pro B550 board, with RGB installed on the southbridge and a built in I/O Shield. The heatsinks are similar but are styled slightly differently while offering the overall same design.

The RGB on southbridge is minimal but still good, offering little lights around the perimeter and can change to the colors you want. Though this style is not as good as a ring and doesn’t diffuse as well as some higher end options, I still like the implementation offered here.

My system consists of: -Ryzen 5 3600 -32gb (4x8gb) Klevv Cras Ram. -2x1Tb NVME drives -4TB HDD -360mm AIO from Coolermaster. (Received for free to review elsewhere and I am using Sycthe Wondersnail fans instead of the cooler master ones now.

) -MSI RX5600xt Gaming X -MSI B550 Gaming Plus. (Now that is. ) -Seasonic Synchro Q704 Case -Seasonic Synchro 650 PSU (This PSU is made for the Synchro Case and is beautiful when paired. ).

I only know the basics of pc building where the main parts go and what are the most important things to do and not to do but I dont know anything about how strong Mainboards are and what should work out of the box and what not to expect.

I choose the Msi Mpg b550 gaming plus because I thought it looks great and does everything that I need for a affordable price which perfectly fitted my budget. When it arrived even though the package was damaged a little bit but I didnt worry about it to much because I really needed the board in time.

I had to do a bios update for ryzen 5000 throg the bios flash button and was worried because the rgb lights next to the graphics card slot didnt light up. That was worrying for me because the only two videos I could find for the installation of the board showed it light up right out of the box.

The fact that the package was slightly damaged reinforced that the board might be partly damaged. Because I really needed the board in time I startet building the system out of the case and after the first boot I was relieved that it wasnt completely broken.

But the rgb still worried me so in installed dragon center for mystic light and I was finally able to turn the rgb on. I dont know if it was just a coincidence that the videos I watched Had it on out of the box and my didnt or something else.

One day after building everything Im very happy with the board because it looks great in my system and a huge difference to my msi b450m pro vdh plus wich was just a brown plate with no accessories or beautifications.

Im very glad I chose to try the board first and that everything works well. I give the board 45 stars because of the little heart attack it gave me. But the fact that it looks so great and works fine now makes a bit up for that.

I’ve had three good builds with Asus MB ‘s from the Athlon era, and this B550 board did not disappoint me. I could quibble about pin locations, side facing SATA ports, and having to cut the button side of the port shield, but these minor things apply to other boards, too.

The flashback feature saved my Ryzen 5600x cpu install. The BIOS download instructions for flashback on Asus website are very literal and must be followed to the letter, as I learned. 1. Use the rename tool with the BIOS download to rename the file from the long download name to the short xxxx.

CAB name. 2. Put the file on the root directory of a flash drive formatted (old) FAT, not FATe. New flash drives are FATe and do not format back to old FAT32. Find a old small capacity one. 3. If the green flashback light flashes three times and stays lit, then the flashback is not working.

4. If flashback is working, the green light blinks on and off for about ten minutes. 5. DO NOT interrupt the flashback process. Give it a good while to be sure it finishes. A small item: I paired this MB with an Asus GTX1650 TUF series graphics card.

Board and card combo is the best looking inside-case hardware I’ve ever seen!.

This is one fabulous looking mainboard with quality components and includes features that come screaming straight at you. I love the way Asus used their TUF colour scheme in the design of the mainboard.

Plenty of USB 3 port availability and also has 2 video out connections to boot (HDMI and Display Port). I also like that they have supplied a matching heatsink for the main NVMe drive. The only downside and issue that I encountered during installation was to get the memory to run at 3200.

The unit failed to post when manually changing the required settings for the profile. It took a bit of searching to find that you have to use slots A2 and B2 in order to use the paired memory at correct speed.

Once that issue was resolved the pc now seems to be running as expected. I bought this mainboard over the 450 chipset in order to have some future upgrade capabilities, including PCIe 4. Also, I had to snap this up as it was on a Black Friday deal.

Hopefully, like my previous Asus mainboard purchases, this product will last me years come.

I bought this last month after it went on offer and I thought it was an absolute steal at the price. It’s got more kit than you know what to do with (I’m using around 6 USB slots, 1 M. 2 PCIe, and most of the SATA) and offers compatibility with both Ryzen 3000 and 5000 CPUs.

On that note, I’m using it with my Ryzen 5600x and it didn’t boot up nicely the first time so I went and used the pretty slick BIOS USB flashback feature. It worked perfectly and the board fired up. At this point I still had no image so I googled to find that my GTX 1070 needed a bit of an update to work with DP on the newer boards.

It was fine on HDMI so I quickly got that sorted. Overall it’s a great board and I’ve had no issues with it so far. I’m using the same Corsair 3200MHz RAM that struggled to run at 2933MHz on my B350 board and I’m tootling along well at 3200MHz with pretty much no adjustments (16-16-16-16-36 and 1.

35V). I won’t be overclocking but may well try out some faster RAM seeing how nicely this one runs. Definitely recommended as an alternative to the MSI and Gigabyte stuff, especially when the pricing is so competitive.

i had a MSI gaming 5 that died. Since the Intel Gen 4 chips are still good I opted to replace the mother board rather then do a new system. This board is PCIe gen 3 so it can still do a decent job of gaming.

I was surprised that when I swapped this board for my defective MSI Z97 Gaming 5, I was still able to use the original windows Key.

Took a little while to travel around the world from China but was totally worth the wait. Got an amazing deal for such a high end motherboard. Very happy with the product, it really was the corner Stone to my current set up I7 4770 3.

4 GHz oc to 4. 2 GHz 16 gb of Corsair ddr3 ram @ 2000 mhz Gigabyte gforce 1080 G1 MSI MS-7818 Z97 Gaming 3 Corsair HX850 watt Corsair MP500 for main 4x 1TB WD HDD in raid 0 Corsair H60 for cooling.

The MSI B450 Gaming PLUS Max motherboard spec wise fitted my requirements. I searched the MSI site to find compatible memory and M2 SSD. The hardware installtion went well. Installation of Windows 10 Pro was occasionally intereupted by the loss of keyboard and/or mouse.

When I started to use the new PC in anger I reoeatedly lost the kayboard and/or mouse. After carefully experimenting with alternative keyboard and mouse I concluded that the problem with the USB ports on the MSI motherboard.

This was confirmed by comments on the web. I eventially overcame the problem by installing a PCI-e USB board. If the memory and M2 ssd I had bought were compatible I would have return the motherboard as faulty and erplaced it with a Ausu or Gygabyte.

Ordered this motherboard along with a 5950x proc, 1000w Phanteks PSU and dd4 4000 ballistics max 32gb (16×2). Out of the box had a ton of issues like usb ports that wouldn’t recognize Windows 10 installer (actual one from Microsoft physical retail box usb), or usb drive with new BIOs as shipped BIOS didn’t recognize 5000 series proc.

Took some McGuyver like monkeying around like using a type-c adapter to get USB devices recognized to get past that problem. Once I got the A7 bios in place the proc was recognized and usb ports started working normally, I could proceed with W10 install.

OS installed but didn’t find network adapters, downloaded from msi site on laptop and installed via usb, finally had internet. It shouldn’t have been this hard, after all that ran ok for 3 weeks then started crashing with XMP on, turned that off, was stable for another week then started crashing again, disabled Game Boost and got another week of stability now keeps crashing even after a OS wipe and reinstall.

MSI techsupport never called me back after leaving a message and never picked up after being on repeat music loop for 3hrs 1st call and 4hrs the next. Do yourself a favor stay away from this product and I would even say MSI in general.

I bought this x570 unify about a week ago, and I am completely in love with it. It’s the perfect match for my 3900x. The construction quality of the board is off the charts! The VRM heatsink is one huge chunk of solid metal.

In fact, the only plastic found on this motherboard, are the connectors and slots. Everything else, is heavy metal. I have yet to see the VRM’s hit above 40c, even when doing some manual overclocking.

So far, it has been extremely stable when I override the voltages. The bios is beautifully laid out. It is straight forward, every parameter is easily found due to its logically laid out fashion. By the way, as of today, November 30th, the EDC exploit is still live and well, within the latest bios.

I did a cinebench R23 with the exploit running (300/300/10) and got a score of 19,836. Without manual EDC, I was getting just under 19k. My current setup consists of x570 Unify 3900x 64 gb 3600 cl16 Crucial Ballistix Power Color Radeon Rx 6800 3x 2tb WD Black NVME ( 2 in RAID 0, 1 for Boot) NZXT X73 360 AIO NZXT C850 PSU Home made open chassis test bench.

This open-box item arrived in good condition and as described, seeming none the worse for its previous adventures. It has now been in daily service for two weeks and counting, and has given me no issues thus far.

Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit, System Builder Edition, installed from DVD with only one minor issue. Windows setup could see my SSD, but wouldn’t initially install the OS to it. I am sorry to say I don’t remember the exact details, but a Google search for the message it gave me found the solution, which was easily implemented, and setup proceeded without further trouble.

The only PCI device I’ve installed is one video card, so I can’t speak for the functionality of the other slots or the board’s SLI or Crossfire performance. It seems to handle a GeForce GTX 960 just fine.

I was particularly happy to find an LGA 1150 board with all the legacy ports I wanted, including VGA, DVI and two PS/2 connectors. This leaves me with plenty of USB ports free for other peripherals, and options if something dies and I need to dig out an old reliable device as a temporary replacement.

The board is a bit on the narrow side. As a result, the video card, once installed, makes the side-facing SATA connectors difficult to access, and I wound up removing the 960 to plug the cables in. Annoying, but not excessively so.

It might be a problem if you’re constantly switching SATA cables around. I’ve seen reviewers elsewhere comment that the board’s width prevented it from aligning properly with the standoffs in their cases.

I had to add an extra standoff in the middle for mine, but all the others that came pre-installed in my Antec 900 seemed to align correctly. There are however some extra holes for additional standoffs in the case, and it’s true that the edge of the board doesn’t seeem to be all that firmly supported, so perhaps most boards are designed for an extra set of standoffs.

(This is the second PC I’ve assembled, and if I remember correctly the first one also had a rather narrow motherboard, so I may not be the best judge. ) This didn’t seem to cause any real problems; it just meant that I had to take some extra care to support the board and limit how much force I used when plugging cables in near the edge.

Although the board technically only has connectors for three case fans, I was able to use the extra connector provided for the CPU cooler to power the 200mm fan at the top of the case. Obviously this wouldn’t be an option if you need both those connectors for a heavy-duty CPU cooling solution.

My case has five fans total, so I had touse a molex adapter for the fifth, but this wasn’t too great a hassle; one came with a fan I had purchased. Aesthetics: The red LED audio track lighting was a surprise and clashed with my blue case lights, but it was easy enough to disable in BIOS once I found the correct setting under peripherals, and this doesn’t seem to have affected the sound quality (please note however that I am not an audiophile.

YMMV. ) The other red components are either hidden under the video card, not visible at my normal viewing angle, or appear black under the blue lights, so they’re not a problem. I’m sure this would be a great-looking board for a rig with a red color scheme.

The shape of the heat sinks is a bit cheesy, but this is not really noticeable through the side panel window when the card is installed.

I bought a pre built PC from CYBERPOWERPC and have been upgrading it. This board is the one that came with the computer I bought. I changed the i5 I had in it with a i7. Recently I was going to change out my HDD to a SSD.

My CPU hadn’t been fully performing the way I wanted so I took it out to check to make sure everything was okay after I installed my SSD. Come to find out there were bent pins on the motherboards CPU pad.

I tried to bend them back into place, but I found 1 or 2 that had broken off completely so it was no use. Since this board has been so amazing and reliable I didn’t think twice about ordering a new one.

So right now I am just waiting for this to come in so I can install everything back into my computer and get going again. CYBERPOWERPC does not warranty physical damage on the computers they sell if they damaged the item or not.

I called them to see and that’s what I was told. So if you are wondering about which motherboard you should get in the LGA 1150 DDR3 range, this board is a no brainer for me and should be for you.

This is my second Gigabyte motherboard and everything went as smoothly as the first one. I don’t play with any overclocking features, so this is an out-of-the-box review. All the components installed easily on the motherboard and were working properly right from the beginning.

The only minor hiccup is that the graphics card in the PCIex16 slot covers up the onboard SATA ports – a byproduct of the board probably being a little smaller than the standard ATX size. If you plug in your SATA components before the graphics card, then it isn’t an issue.

The CD had the latest version of all the drivers, but it unfortunately mixed drivers with bloatware as part of the installation process. You need to look at each item independently to know whether it should be installed or not.

For example, the Creative SB X-FI utilities are strictly optional software and have nothing to do with the audio drivers. The Ethernet controller driver, unfortunately, was only installed under its bloatware component.

I already had two ATX TUF X570’s with excellent results, so I went with Asus’s TUF family again for a more compact build, upgrading my daughter’s school+gaming PC. Installed it on an Antec NX200 M case.

Performs greatly with a 5600X CPU, and despite the form factor there’s decent clearance from the CPU to the PCIEv4x16/GPU slot to install a Noctua NH-U12S cooler comfortably in the vertical position.

This SKU doesn’t have wireless, but it has an Intel Ethernet 2. 5G NIC and it’s packed with USB ports up to 3. 2 and Type-C; it’s hard to find a Micro-ATX board with all I/O you need plus performance / price / VRM quality.

I only wanted Bluetooth so I added a $30 PCIe card for that; which I also like so I can easily upgrade the WiFi/BT AX chip in a motherboard that doesn’t have an easily-accessible M2 M-Key slot for that.

This still leaves one PCIe3x16 slot free so it’s OK for me. Only complaint is the limited number of chassis fan headers but that’s a common trait of Micro-ATX boards. Right now the available headers are just right for the build, but as soon as I can upgrade its GPU to something better and more power-hungry, I’ll probably want an extra fan at the top to help exhaust heat without much extra noise (many fans going slowly beat fewer fans going fast).

I can use the CPU_OPT header for that, or share the same header as the back fan’s with a splitter, not ideal solutions if you’re nitpicky about that stuff but again common tradeoffs of a compact build.

I’ve only had this motherboard for a few weeks and haven’t tested it to its full capacity just yet, but I love it. On a surface level, I find the design really cool and pleasing. There’s an RGB light in the bottom right that always glows and can sync up with the rest of my LEDs in my case for a seamless lighting experience.

Onto the more technical side, I had the staff at MicroCenter install this one for me (after having another motherboard in my PC that wasn’t compatible with my CPU), but from what I can tell all the slots are clearly labeled (thank goodness! on my old one the proper hookups were so hard to find and figure out) and easy to find, so setting it up would be a breeze.

The only thing I wish it had was more RGB headers, but splitters aren’t expensive, so I can deal with that in favor of a fast, reliable, and stylish motherboard. The WiFi extension was easy to figure out and set up, and despite my PC being in a basement apartment with my router in another room through thicker walls, it gets GREAT signal.

I haven’t had an issue with it not picking up a signal yet. Highly recommend this motherboard. It’s pricier than some others, of course, but you get what you pay for, and this one is certainly worth the price.

This motherboard is all-around a good performer. Build quality is high. Aesthetics are good. I have a couple of gripes with it. First, one NVMe slot is so close to the CPU socket that I couldn’t fit a drive in it with my AIO shifted to cool Ryzen chiplets.

The other NVME slot is buried under a cumbersome heat spreader with no stand-off to attach it. It’s easily fixable with some parts, but I was disappointed by the out of box NVMe compatibility. Second, the Aura Sync software is now bundled with the rather cumbersome Armory Crate software, which I’ve already uninstalled, so that was kind of disappointing as well.

On the bright side, it enabled resizable BAR with a couple of clicks, so I’m feeling positive overall.

These Series II B450 boards are really nice. I opted for the TUF model as it seems like a nice blend of performance and value. It is running an R5 3600 with 3600mhz RAM and a GTX 1080. I really like the BIOS setup and adjustment screen.

There are a lot of options from overclocking to fan tuning. Also the board can get its BIOS flashed without a CPU or RAM in it which is another cool feature. The heatsinks are pretty beefy on this board and I appreciate that versus some of the smaller dinky heatsinks I’ve seen on other boards.

Color scheme is nice as well. Good Full ATX board overall.

If you’re gaming on a budget and want to invest your money in the right areas. This board is perfect to pair with the 3900x. I purchased this board along with 3900x, 32gb of ram, 1TB Nvme and 1 TB SSD, 750w psu.

This board was extremely easy to setup. I was up and running in no time. The bios has many features for basic and advance users. I love the hardware monitoring layout. Has LED controller built into the build so you can control LED lights and colors via software of the mobo.

Only minor cons i’ve noticed is there’s only 1 nvme slot. Iwish there was double. There is 2 PCI slots for video cards which is a pro!.

The motherboard works as intended, just doesnt work with second gen processors due to outdated bios. The Motherboard therefore caused me great hassle. As long as you are able to update the bios, your PC should post normally (i had to go to another town via trian to get mine working but thats a long story).

Altogether, a great bit of kit if you know how to use it. hope you dont make the same mistake.

Ideal for a gaming pc and holds high capacity memory etc