Being part of the TUF Gaming Alliance, the ASUS TUF B450-PLUS GAMING motherboard features the typical black and yellow styling and the “Eagle” logo on the IO shroud and the southbridge heatsink. Ensuring plenty of upgradeability are two x16 PCI-E ports, one of which is steel armoured for improved strength, and a trio of x1 PCI-E ports for add-in cards.

We also get a total of six SATA 3.0 ports, four are vertical, in the very bottom-right, with another two positioned at 90° just above the TUF GAMING logo on the right edge. Rounding out the storage options is a single M.2 port supporting both SATA and NVMe drives.



The FORGE OC bundle is equipped with 16GB of DDR4 memory split between two DIMMs; they’ve opted to use the Kingston HyperX Fury 2400MHz kit with black heat spreaders. Going with two DIMMs leaves a further two unpopulated for future upgrade options, if or when DDR4 pricing drops.



Ensuring the Ryzen’s 8 cores remain cool is the AMD Wraith Spire RGB cooler, a top-down stock cooler which is bundled with the 2700 from the factory. This features a PWM fan to ensure noise never needs to exceed what is necessary.



Looking at the rear IO, we get the following:
1x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
2x USB 2.0 ports
1x DVI-D video-out
1x USB 3.0 Type-C
1x HDMI 2.0
2x USB 3.1
1x Gigabit Ethernet
2x USB 3.0
Audio in/out