Hey all, just hoping to get some advice on a getting a b550 motherboard for my weird use case. Looking at slowly piecing together a system that will be sued for a couple of different things. To start it’s mostly just going to run chrome for watching stuff off my plex server in the home theater. In future I the plan is to add a gpu for running my vr headset and also my fathers flight sim stuff, good chance we may upgrade the cpu at that time as well. For now, if possible, I have an r5 1600 that I would like to use if I can. mATX form factor is an added bonus if I can, just to take up less space on the av shelf in the theater.
TLDR: recommendation on a b550 mobo that might support r5 1600. Willing to go b450 if none of the b550 support the 1600. mATX form factor is a bonus.
b450 will only support Ryzen 3xxx (but not 3200G or 3400G) and above. So B450 it is (probably). Will provide three options, from cheap to expensive:
- mATX - ASRock B450M PRO4 ($94.99). Don’t put anything above a 3700X in this one, it may melt your VRMs. Pretty cheap though.
- mITX - Gigabyte B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI ($119.99). Going even smaller, a single form factor is great.
- mITX - Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX ($179.99). Great VRMs, decent price. Pair it with a Ryzen 3 3100 for now (~$100) for best effect, will handle a 3950X without any problems (though cooling is a different matter).
I would go with one of the mITX options given the large availability of small good-looking cases, but that’s just me.
I bought that Asrock B450 Pro4 you mention. It was $75 at Newegg and was flashed to the latest BIOS on arrival, so it accepted the Ryzen 5 3400G I bought without using an older Ryzen to update BIOS as many people have had to do, before.
A few comments on things which are not obvious to the prospective buyer:
This mobo is rated for lower and lower RAM speeds as you increase the number of DDR4 sticks. I began with 4x 2400 sticks in the board and TrueNAS would not even install without many odd errors as the memory went nuts in the background. I dropped down to 1 stick and everything installed perfectly. The motherboard does not automatically remind you in the BIOS settings that using more sticks requires slower RAM speeds. You have to find that in the small print in the mobo manual. It will happily run 4 sticks at 2666 as the memory errors vomit on everything you try to install.
Next, the upper m.2 slot disables the lower pcie x16 slot. If you are running a mini SAS to 8x SATA card in the top pcie x16 slot and want to use any other cards at all on this board, they need to be PCIE 2.0 x1 cards which thankfully are cheap and plentiful.
Next, the lower M.2 slot disables 2 of the 8 onboard SATA ports, which you are probably not using anyway if you are building a TrueNAS machine with a mini SAS card, like you should.
Lastly, for the Picasso series, ECC is only supported with PRO APUs, for example Ryzen 3400G Pro.
Those are my “surprises” that I thought I would pass along to peeps.
edit - the ECC ram I ordered just arrived, so I swapped it in, flashed the venerable MEMtest util to bootable thumbdrive and am banging away on this new RAM like a madman, just to make certain it’s running properly before I button up the case again.
?? You’ve purchased the ATX variant yes? B450M Pro4 is the mATX form factor preferred.
@TikTok
I’ve purchased the Asrock b450M pro4 back in August at a microcenter (used, OPEN box, no return, cheap).
Got around to building it last week (uefi was p3.90), r7 2700x, 32GB xpg gammix 10 (4dimm x 8GB), gtx1070, intel 660p nvme + 2tb m.2 sata card, Wifi6 pci-e card, LSI sas controller at x4 pci-e… working without XMP enabled yet with xmp timings set manually. My ryzen, 4 dimms populated does 2933mhz as per specification works. PBO + PB XFR also WORK with over 150 WATT cpu draw with Lin-Pack burn in, doable (though I don’t know of any motherboard I would trust my cpu/data to run 24/7) Stability and realistic expectations are my main goal, for benchmarking and getting a feel of capability is fine metric. So durability and reliability… no so much.
… sorry for flexing a bit. The Asrock b450M Pro4 has my vote!
Yes, the ATX variant is what I am running with a Ryzen Pro 3400G ~~ can you explain why the mATX board is “preferred” ? Also, which part of your spec was the “flex” ?
OH as an aside, I was very impressed that this extremely inexpensive motherboard supports PCIe bifurcation in BIOS.
Original Poster has mentioned they’d much prefer a mATX motherboard. I followed this thread when I was building the system and used the few remarks you’ve had made it less complicated. I ran into few hurdles and ultimately went smoother than my x570 build.
-Asrock does have some cool features in my experience giving more features per dollar sans product segmentation.
mATX boards will host MOST, of what the ATX could account for [4 DIMM slots, etc]. The PCIe arrangement, would be obvious reduction point [typically is x16, x1, x16 (x4 electrically)].
The reason I went along with ATX instead of mATX was the presence of the 2nd x16 PICe slot. Since the first x16 has the mini SAS HBA, I wanted a 2nd x16 for a dual 10Gb NIC ~ my next project is a SAN for this box.
You can certainly use the PCIe 2.0 x1 slots on the mATX for a double 1Gb NIC but that’s not what I had in mind; I wanted to upgrade to 10 or more Gbit.
edit: OH I see that 10Gbit NICs are available in x4 so the mATX would have been possible to use if I would settle for a single port 10Gb NIC add-on
@Jkay
Really? https://www.sonnettech.com/product/presto10gbaset.html
and then obviously there are limits… https://ahelpme.com/linux/tips/dual-10gbit-network-using-pci-2-0-5gt-s-x4-what-is-the-maximum-bandwidth/
The possibilities still there.
Well thanks I looked for a while and never saw a 2x 10Gb NIC on 4x PCie.
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