ASUS Prime B450M-A II Micro ATX Motherboard

update: Oct 1, 2018
The motherboard works fine, plenty of USB 3.0 ports (I use the pc to run an oculus rift, so I use a lot of the USB ports). I’m running a 2600x on it, with 16gb ddr4 3000 (c15) from corsair, pny 480gb nvme, 1tb ssd (evo 850), a bunch of old hard disk drives, and a Zotac 1070 ti mini. The 2600x seems to be using its full precision boost 2 frequency. Feels (obviously) really fast.

I wished this board was available with with a heatsink over the VRM, wifi/bluetooth, and two m.2 slots. It’d be my ideal micro atx board, as I don’t want to have an ATX tower (or even a small but wide ATX one). I plan to use an 2700 in it, and I wanted to overclock but not very sure about how stable it’ll perform with the weak VRM/no heat sink (and without holes to attach one over the circuitry).

At first, I gave this motherboard a vengeful 1 star review, as its manual lacked a diagram about the power/reset button connections. This wasn’t my first build, but I was just really annoyed to search for the mapping for power connections without finding it. Nevertheless, the comments about the polarity of the power button were right – it doesn’t matter.

Now, I’m not totally clueless about electricity and power. I’m used to reading datasheets for projects in college (I’m a computer engineering major), and I still think the lack of proper instructions for the connections – something that generally doesn’t happen with sensors and other electronics parts – was frustrating, especially because I was finishing this build in a rush (it was in the middle of the night), so partly my bad. I didn’t connect the fact that the power button in a computer was just a push button toggle switch and the reset, just a push button.

However, I think it’s elitism to think that only people who know these things should be allowed to build a pc without trouble and without professional help. It’s the manual’s job to help with this, as connections on the motherboard are pretty simple with the other hardware. Gosh, even applying thermal paste is something anyone can do with some care. So no: building a pc should not require professional assembly at all.

To give a recent example, I built last year a pc that used the B350 version of this motherboard. That mobo’s manual had a simple nice diagram for power connections, so I didn’t have to think at all about what they meant when connecting everything and powering up the system.

In sum, I’m not an expert, but I’m not a beginner either. So, if I wanted a simple, nice diagram for that, I imagine others would benefit from a diagram printed on the manual, as well. Just like the previous version of this mobo had.

And that’s my only criticism about this B450 motherboard, because the price is right. Although for those shopping for a ryzen mATX mobo right now, it seems the MSI Mortar has the best VRMs among AM4’s mATX (with a heat sink over them, of course). It’s likely a better choice for the 2700x and for overclocking the APUs.

original review:
Incredibly enough, the manual doesn’t state how to connect the power button jumper, and the “diagram” on the motherboard is not very helpful either. Frustating. This process should never be a trial and error thing.

Asus never disappoints when it comes to motherboard, the temperature is around 30C to 35C under normal usage.

La calidad es aceptable. Este es mi segunda tarjeta que compro.

Arrived in very good condition Is already updated for Ryzen 5000

First ever review for me, but felt others (Linux users) might want to know.

This board provides good value and it does come (as another reviewer noted) with BIOS 1201. 1201 will let you boot up a Ryzen 3 or 5 3200G/3400G (know that these chips are actually based on last year’s 11nm & thus not true 3000 cpu releases). But what non-users of ASUS motherboards might not be aware of or not know is that the BIOS EZ Flash 3 Utility provided by ASUS (inside the BIOS0 does not require an OS to update the BIOS. You ca actually update the motherboard without any hard drive/SSD/etc installed).

Upon receiving this Prime B450M-A I immediately put it into a spare case I had lying around, put in a Ryzen 3 3400G I had picked up on Amazon sold for $88, used the provided AMD cooler it came with and it’s pre-applied paste (unless you game 24-7, don’t listen to the Net chatter about needing brand name, expensive thermal paste), then installed this ram – Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 3000 MHz DDR4 DRAM Desktop Gaming Memory Kit 16GB (8GBx2) CL15 BLS2K8G4D30AESCK (White) along with an totally empty non-formatted new Crucial120GB SSD I had lying around. This was all powered by a Corsair 400W PSU.

Before doing anything OS-wise, I started the system up and hit “delete” to get into the BIOS. Using the ASUS EZ Flash Utility in the BIOS, which gives you the option of either using your own fat16/32 thumb drive (don’t use any other format) or you can use the ethernet Internet connection the board already detects, I immediately updated the BIOS to ASUS’ latest BIOS, 1820 (just yesterday I did it again & updated 1823). I then waited as the BIOS restarted itself, then stuck in an Ubuntu 18.04.3 ISO on a DVD (just choose your CD/DVD burner in the BIOS front page as your first boot choice) and hit delete again to get back into the BIOS. I chose my CD/DVD drive as my first boot choice on the first page of ASUS’ excellent BIOS, and then it started up. Within several minutes, Ubuntu was completely installed on the SSD (this chip/memory/board is fast), the system rebooted, and I was staring at Ubuntu 18.04.3 where it made my 20″ PC screen the “primary” while my 42″ plasma TV was also picked up as the “secondary” screen. This is/was great, no messing with that, correct 1920×1080 resolutions too.

Since the above (about 9-10 days), I have not had one crash or problem with the board running any version of Ubuntu from 18.04.3 & above. This computer system is in the living room where it gets heavy use by the family and kids for everything, from Netflix streaming, to multi-purpose PC uses, etc (I won’t talk of this Ryzen 3 3200G’s gaming performance, as it is already well-covered on the Net–at this price, for gaming, it simply rocks and, unbelievably to me, the included cooler handles things quite well–again, as long as the kids don’t game 24-7, if that stats happening, which might as they see how fast this system is and what it can handle, I will get a bigger and better cooler to be safe).

Also, here’s what I found (over the past few days of testing) in terms of what will successfully boot Linux-wise on this Prime B450M-A motherboard using the latest AMD Ryzen 3 3200G chip mentioned above: (you’ll notice as I list the successes and failures, the Linux OSes that come with Kernel 5 or above, they all boot up great; the others do not and you will have to perform some tricks and kernel installs to get things going if you use a Linux OS that doesn’t come with kernel 5 or above):

Successes:
Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS and all 19s 9I tried 19.10 too, worked great)
Fedora 31 (Fedora actually seemed to be the fastest out of these 2 successes, but I stuck to Ubuntu for gaming reasons)

Failed to boots:
Debian 10.1
Linux Mint 19 (and version)
MX-Linux 19
Opensuse LEAP & Tumbleweed
etc, etc…(tried about 6 others, all failed because they don’t have come with kernel 5 or above).

Last thing I want to note is the latest BIOS updates come where ASUS (upon instructions) have disabled PCIe4. This “disabling of PCIe4” not ASUS’s fault, this is AMD’s. AMD is still not enabling PCIe4 on 300/400 series motherboards, and are instructing motherboard manufactuers (if they had enabled PCIe4) to disable PCIe4. AMD, if you know about the Pinnacle Ridge cpu clusterf#ck last year that they are still trying to be clear up completely, this board with the recently released Ryzen 3/5 3000 cpu(s) is a welcome change. ASUS did nothing wrong here. AMD is still saying they are not going to be releasing Linux-specific Ryzen drivers, which is kind of interesting since it was us Linux people who kept AMD afloat back in the dark days when it was thought Intel would crush them & drive them into insolvency. Sure hopes AMD rethinks things, and gets their act together over these next 4-9 months Linux-wise as the truly new 3000 cpus come out next summer.

In sum, the ASUS Prime B450M-A board I tested here with a Ryzen 3 3200G cpu and 3000 MHZ DDR4 was a fun, hassle-free build. I also know this board will easily handle and provide a future upgrade path for AMD cpu(s) going forward over the next few years.

Hope this review helps any other Linux users out there.

I ordered ASUS B450M-A because it’s featuring USB3.2 Gen 2 and is in very reasonable cost. ASUS also provide a quite useful tool – Armoury Crate that will install drivers and monitor my system in graphic. However, The Micro-ATX does not work well with my AMD RX580 GPU. It runs fine but the thickness of the GPU with fan covers the PCIE_1 slots so that I have nothing left. I wish I thought about that before I made decision since I intend to install a PCIE to M.2 SSD card to add more SSD space,