GIGABYTE AORUS B450 I PRO WIFI Review

👤by Matthew Hodgson Comments 📅04-09-18
Conclusion

The AORUS B450 I Pro WiFi has, regardless of its tiny size, has performed remarkably, swapping punches with many of the X470 and B450 boards in our tests.

Gigabyte have done a fine job of packing this feature set into a small amount of available real-estate, including an M.2 NVMe slot, equipped with large heatsink, which may prove very useful in smaller builds with lesser airflow. There’s the large heatsink on the 4+2 phase power delivery sector, helping keep things cool even when delivering upwards of 100W to the CPU. WiFi has been included on the rear which is essential if you also wish to use a discrete GPU of any kind. Four SATA ports, USB 2.0 and 3.0, and RGB lighting connections are all included too. The rear IO has three display outputs, all of which can be used at the same time if your chosen CPU allows.

32GB of DDR4 3200MHz, Ryzen 3, 5 and 7 (1st and 2nd gen) CPUs as well as the 2200G and 2400G APUs, four SATA HDDs/SSDs, an M.2 and a full-size GPU can all be utilised on this board, making it as capable as most motherboards, if you so wish.

Overclocking wasn’t a strong point of this motherboard, while being capable, it got far too hot for our liking; but having said that, the B450, regardless of its ability to overclock or not, isn’t designed to be utilised by those seeking the most extreme of overclocks, never mind customers purchasing a Mini-ITX format board, measuring only 170 x 170; you simply can’t expect this kind of ‘board to support high end overclocking of this kind.

For the price point, we believe the AORUS B450 I Pro WiFi opens up many avenues to those wishing to build a high-powered rig within a tiny chassis, such as a gaming PC below a TV or a media PC with a low-power AMD Ryzen CPU.

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the gaming performance on this motherboard was around 5-10% lower than the same RX480 and 2700X setup that we use on all of our AMD test rigs. We installed the correct drivers and ensured that the BIOS was completely up to date. Besides, it still performed well, but if gaming is your aim, perhaps look at alternatives.



If you’re building a small PC but don’t want to give up too many high-end features such as M.2 NVMe support and plenty of display outputs, the AORUS B450 I Pro WiFi should be top of the wish-list.

Pros
+ Competitive performance in most tests
+ Utilised the real-estate well (170mm x 170mm)
+ Large heatsink on M.2 slot
+ Rear IO features WiFi
+ No RGB lighting
+ 3 Display outputs

Neutral
+- A little pricey

Cons
- No USB Type-C
- Lacked some gaming performance
- Power delivery heatsink got extremely hot during overclocking tests


Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Stay connected with the Vortez Social Media pages:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Join in with the discussions on Discord

20 pages « < 17 18 19 20

Comments