ASRock B450 Fatal1ty Gaming-ITX/ac Review

👤by Matthew Hodgson Comments 📅25-09-18
Conclusion
As has become pretty common-place, the B450 chipset definitely doesn’t disappoint. We’ve once again been impressed by the performance of the AMD Ryzen 2700X within such a small motherboard.

The all-black design with the small light-blue heatsinks ensures the motherboard won’t look out of place in any build, but it won’t stand out from a crowd either, if that’s your goal. Having said that, if you wish to show off your build to others, there’s plenty of larger and more feature-packed motherboards you can choose from.

The rear IO gives you a decent selection of ports, including the gaming-focussed Intin1ty USB port for decreased latency when sniping people in Fortnite. The WiFi antennas ensure you can grab an internet connection anywhere near a router and the HDMI and DisplayPort make this viable for a tiny gaming PC with AMDs APU 2200G and 2400G CPUs.

M.2 connectivity on the back of the motherboard isn’t something we see often, usually due to thermal issues, especially with some of the fast NVMe drives, but it’s also limited to only the 22/80 M.2 format. We’ve seen much more elegant solutions with the drive on the front of the board from competitors, even within this form factor.

Unfortunately, overclocking was a bit of a let-down; we just couldn’t find any proper stability past 4.1GHz on all of the cores, with some motherboards managing up to 4.35GHz with the same chip. We believe this is down to the small heatsinks and overall small size of the board. However, having said all of that, we can’t really mark down the motherboard on its lack of overclocking potential.

Power consumption was good compared to other B450 chipset boards, likely down to the small size of the board and less features, but it bodes well for small, low power systems.

Finally, price. The ASRock B450 Fatal1ty Gaming-ITX/ac is priced at GBP £119.99 / USD $119.99 / AUS $179.00, putting it firmly in the way of some incredibly capable B450 motherboards, but a good £20 cheaper than the Gigabyte Aorus B450 I PRO WIFI which has mostly the same features and performance, save for a little bigger heatsinks and better M.2 positioning; though you do gain a USB Type-C on the rear.



If a low power, small form factor system is on the cards, the ASRock B450 Fatal1ty needs to be given a serious consideration. It will, without doubt, form a solid basis for any system at a decent price point.

Pros
+ Competitive performance
+ Good selection of ports on the rear IO (including WiFi)
+ HDMI and DisplayPort
+ Tiny size
+ M.2 slot
+ Price

Neutral
+- Not great for overclocking

Cons
- Small heatsinks get very hot
- Gaming performance wasn’t as good as other B450 boards


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