Experience with B450 ITX boards?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for experience with B450 ITX boards cause I’m pretty torn between them and can’t find a real “winner” for me. 2700X and G.Skill 3600 CL15 B-Die, but probably no manual overclocking, let PB2/XFR2/PBO do it’s thing and I don’t care much about a good audio solution (external sound card).

ASRock Fatal1ty B450 (3+2):
Negatives: reports of massively overheating VRMs, bad M.2 slot placement on the back (overheating again), only 3+2 phases (does it matter?), bad Bios?, no official memory support for choosen kit/3600
Positives: good back IO (PS2 for keyboard, TOSLINK, USB 3.1)

ASUS Strix B450-I (6+1):
Negatives: The most expensive, no PS2, useless RGB features (for me),
Positives: Good (best? of the bunch) Bios, M.2 Slot with good cooling, the VRM, supports the 3600CL15 memory, USB 3.1

Gigabyte B450I Aorus Pro (4+2):
Negatives: No PS2, no official memory support for choosen kit/3600
Positives: USB 3.1

MSI B450I Gaming Plus (6+2):
Negatives: no official memory support for choosen kit, no USB 3.1, max 3466MHz mem clock
Positives: PS2, good(ish) VRM

Seems like the ASUS is the best of the 4? Only downside, no PS2 and more expensive due to RGB are no dealbreakers.

If you have any experience or know more about these boards, I’d love to hear it.

Cheers :wave:

Any links for the ASRock B450 overheating? I can’t find anything after a quick search.

I ran it through google translate (I reckon you don’t speak german?) linky link and a video on youtube that talked about hot VRMs (don’t think it was buildzoid) during OC, maybe I can find it again.

I’ll gladly translate: "Complete letdown. Do not buy this board under any circumstances. The voltage regulators (I assume he means the mosfets) are running at 120°C (248°F) without load. Often the PC does not even start up. " (Google translate was pretty much spot on)
This very much sounds like a defective board. I would not expect this to be representative.

The second comment shows more realistic temperatures. 95°C max is okay for mosfets, it’s not great but most components can handle quite a bit more (depends on how far you want to go with overclocking). The more important thing here are the electrolytic caps. I agree, the M.2 placement is a bit of a problem. How big of a thermal issue that is will depent on your usecase.

Here is the buildzoid video (although not with hands on boards):

Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch, but I am a native English speaker.

I’ll have to look into it more, I know the AB350 version of the board has two sensors that will always read over 100C, there’s a hypothesis that the board might be wired for the sensors but does not actually have them.

I have one of the ASRock AB350 boards (and formerly an X370) and I think they are good boards for the money.


Anyways, I have no experience with B450 boards directly, I only have opinions of the brands as a whole because of other stuff I have from them.

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I´m very busy at work atm, so i didnt really have much time to update my vrm topics.
I do have vrm overview info´s on B450 itx boards.
But i didnt really had the time to add it to the topic.
I will update the topic maybe this week, if time allows me to.

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@MisteryAngel That would be greatly appreciated!

@anotherriddle that was one, the other one from him was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APo_Pmr-JIk but this one is about X470 and more generally about how to choose a board.

@w.meri I think I’m really picky about choosing a board, they are generally all good (I too heard good stuff about ASRock, are there really any bad brands anymore?) and I should just pick one and get started with building. But since I’m not in a hurry to buy and build, I’ll wait and see what I can find :slight_smile: L1 is a fantastic resource!

From my experience you can’t brush one brand with one colour any more. In general most boards just work for everyday use, however when you have special use cases or you want to bring your hardware to its limit you have to start comparing board by board like you are doing now.

Yeah, devil in the details. Especially the bios (and the OC features supported) seem to be a “pain point” on some boards. The VRM is fixable with a fan/good airflow most of the time.

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Asrock. Pre bent PCBs, bogus doubling scheme, probably wrongly advertised voltage controller suppliers, no VRM overheating protection. CCleaner Happy Wheels

I am not quite sure what you want to express here.

Msi board is ok, only issue I had was with ram xpm profiles causing crashes. Of u want no issues I would go with Asus for an itx board.