Product on Review: AS Rock B450M Pro4
Manufacturer: AS Rock
Street Price: GBP £79.99 / USD $79.99 / AUD $149.99
Back at the end of July, following on from the X470 chipset, AMD launched their B450 motherboard lineup, offering a more budget-friendly entry point to the AMD Ryzen processors. ASRock were quick off the mark, releasing several new motherboards to cater for different criteria; today we look at the AS Rock B450M Pro4 motherboard.
The B450 chipset is designed to offer a better bang-for-your-buck ratio than the X470 by cutting some non-essential features while still providing a solid base for your Ryzen 2nd Gen CPU.
ASRock have retained a pair of M.2 ports, a pair of PCI-E x16 slots, as well as a x1 slot. We also see four SATA 6Gbps and four DDR4 DIMM slots, ensuring the essentials are catered for. All of that is crammed into a smaller mATX form factor, but considering the low pricepoint, things look incredibly promising.
We’ve plugged our AMD Ryzen 2700X CPU into the B450M Pro4 and now we’ll compare it to the X470 line up, let’s see if it can hold its own against the big boys.
ASRock on the StoreMI Technology on the B450M Pro4:
A powerful tool that combines the speed of your SSD with the capacity of your hard disk into a single, fast, easy-to-manage drive. SSDs are fast, but expensive, and offer minimal capacity. Mechanical hard drives boast large capacity for a low price, but are much slower than an SSD. AMD StoreMI technology “combines” these two types of storage into a single drive and automatically moves the data you access the most to the SSD, so you get the best of both worlds: SSD responsiveness, and mechanical hard disk capacity. You can also use up to 2GB of RAM as a last-level cache for ultra-fast data.