AM4 budget motherboards. What should i buy?

Hello!
I can't decide between 2 budget AM4 motherboards...

Both have the same price. Which one do you guys think its better?

I've had a lot of time with the Gigabyte option, it's a very solid board for the price. Has a good feature set and does a lot of the same things that the higher end X370 boards do. Supports DDR4 up to 3000MHz so far but Gigabyte has made mention that they plan on expanding that with upcoming UEFI updates.

I vote ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming K4

  • 9 phase power
  • More power delivery heatsinks
  • More storage I/O
  • More rear USB ports
  • Apparently supports DDR4 3200+

To be honest though, I doubt most people would really notice a difference between the two.

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/\ as above.
asrock creates better mobos for its price tag.

I hate to say this, as i am to buy the white twin of the Asrock - the B350 Pro4, but if you will overclock i would say the Gigabite because of Dual Bios and better soundcard... You can torture the BIOS as much as you like, then you flip a switch and you have brand new untortured BIOS to torture... Hardware sadist's dream...
If you are not going to overclock - Asrock all the way. I am fanboy and brand loyal bastard, so Asrock...
Now, because i am an ASS (who have been drinking rum for the last couple hours) i will counter my buddies from the forum...

It's actually 6+3... It's important to make that distinction, because the Gigabyte is 4+3... the 6(4 respectively) provide the power for the cores, so at the end of the day the Asrock is having better power delivery in general.

completely unimportant... The 3 phases in both boards above the socket are meant for controllers and APUs, meaning in CPU only scenario (that we have currently), there is no significant load on those 3 phases, to make the heatsink useful...

Anyway, the largest differences are:
Gigabyte - dual bios and better sound
Asrock - more IO options and better power delivery

Couple UEFI revisions could change the memory compatibility, so there you go...

Both boards are very similar really.
I would just compair them based on feutures, rather then vrm design.
Because the vrm design on both boards are mediocre anyways.

I think that the Gigabyte might have nicer onboard audio, and dual bios.
Which if you decide to go with Gigabyte you should update firstlly.
Because out of the box bioses on Gigabyte boards could be abit wonky.
I personally like the Asrocks bios a littlebit better.
But overall both boards are very similar, and in terms of overclocking,
i dont think that there will be that much between them.
Okay the Asrock does come with a 6 + 3 phase design vs a 4+3 phase design on the Gigabyte.
But the Gigabyte might use higher rated mosfets, based on those inductors on there.
But unfortunatlly i have not found much info on B350 boards vrm designs yet.

Thanks alot guys for the help. I decided to go with ASRock. I'm not going to OC and I'm going to use a external headphone amp. :D

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For a budget x370, check out the BIOSTAR X370GT5

$129.99

Between the ASrock and Gigabyte, i would go for the ASrock K4 without a doubt

After looking at B350s since release. I was going to go for the MSI Tomahawk Arctic White B350 for $119 or $109 after Rebate until somebody straightened me out concerning MSI's advertisement that it supports Crossfire. I found out that the PCI-E 3.0 16x run at only 4x in what AMD used to call CrossfireX. In order to get 8x on both cards I need the X370 which was more than I could afford or was willing to pay!

As a result, I decided I needed to try get a better deal so I just got off the phone with Newegg where I was able to negotiate a special discount with Free Shipping on an X370 for only $118 after Rebate.
What do you think about this board?

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Probably a good deal for X370. And ASRock really kicks ass in price/performance these days.
Personally I needed a third full size (well, 4x at least) PCIe slot so I got me the Asus Prime X370 Pro.

I understand ASUS has fanatical customer loyalty, but bad report after bad report concerning their AM4 Mainboards and EFI troubles I'm surprised people aren't avoiding them like the plague!

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One thing about Gigabyte, they seem to be the only manufacturer that is still offering Dual BIOS.
All these others ceased this and went with flashing software in unison just like what happened with the Pascal GPU's last summer. I'm really not happy about this trend, and as enthusiasts we should not be silent as it hurts us the most.

They do this since mid 2000s... I had an AM2 system in 2006 and I had both dual bios and a software for flashing bios while windows was operating, which was I believe the only one at the time. All others was still doing it with USB sticks and so on crap...
I'm disappointed Asrock stopped doing the dual bios thing. I am running an Asrock FM2+ board with dual bios, but now I don't think they have any AM4 board with it...

Asus are fludding the media with products. 90% of all ryzen reviews are made on the Asus Hero board, that seems to have quite a bit of issues with many things.
The other brands barely got any coverage. I am still waiting for Reviews on MSI from the sources I actually follow. There are 17 000 Asus reviews. For the first 2 weeks Asus was the only option on the market where I live, not to mention, that it's quite difficult for a user, who have heard for the last 4-5 years Asus are great, to not go for them. I mean "I have limited money, everyone say that Asus are great, all over YouTube people are using Asus and corsair, they would not use them if they were bad"...

And that is the only Asus AM4 board I have heard to have some problems.
My Prime X370 is fine so far.

Asus Crosshair Vi Hero is also a great board.
Its one of the better boards in terms of build quality.
Some bios versions for the board are a bit wonky,
But Gigabyte doesnt do that much better.

I'm of the opinion that ASUS generally makes very high quality devices, but not enough to justify the premium pricing.
My point about them is not concerning the build quality of their AM4 mainboards, but the various trouble users are having getting Ryzen to work out of the box and how slow the bug fixes have been.
AsRock for some reason has been having less issues particularly with RAM.

In Germany the Prime X370 Pro is one of the cheapest X370 boards. In fact it is one of the cheapest ways to get three PCIe 4x or bigger cards onto one RYZEN system.

The m-ATX is pretty much in the middle, the Prime B350 Plus is the cheapest full size ATX B350 board.

The Crosshair is around the same price as the Taichi. ASRocks X370 Gaming Pro is way out there, on par with MSI's X370 Titanium.

You must be looking at way different numbers, my friend.

Yes, from what I've seen pricing has not been consistent around the globe, and in some areas there is a lack of choice of brands. I was amazed at the difference in prices on a top secret German website called https://www.mindfactory.de/

We don't even have the Prime here...
Up until a week ago we didn't had the TaiChi either...
Anyways, the 150-160,-Euro Asrock X370 boards are not to be overlooked. I still remain on the position, that a decent B350 board is all a normal every day user is ever going to need...

I had my finger poised to strike the Purchase button on a MSI Tomahawk Arctic B350 but I was able to buy an AsRock X370 for $1 less.
Some retailers are trying to take advantage of shortages of product by charging way over the SRP.