Gadgetory

what's up guys so AMD recently launched their B 450 platform with a whole lineup of v4 50 motherboards one of which we'll be taking a look at today this is the asus rog Strix B 450 eye gaming it's a mini ITX board it's actually the first and only be 450 board I've received here in the studio which is why we're taking a look at it I didn't really have meant many other options at this point but it's a cool little board oh let me hold on plastic wrap plastic wrap alert one sec oh oh it broke in half so you guys even get a double feature here so it's always a little one the little ones are always the best the corsair k70 RGB mark 2 features a variety of genuine Cherry MX switches vibrant customizable RGB backlighting and a solid aluminum frame built to last enjoy features such as USB pass-through multimedia controls windows lock key and more available in black or white and silver click the link below for more info now that I have your attention B 450 is 2 X 470 SB 350 was 2 X 370 so this is basically a much cheaper alternative with a lot of the same features that you'll find on the higher-end rise in support of other boards so that's exciting now since the p450 platform is the focus for today's video I wanted to quickly highlight some of the differences between this platform and X 470 as well as be 350 its predecessor before we dive into the board itself so for starters I would say X 470 is really reserved for people who are our users who are trying to hit the highest possible overclocks they're generally a bit more over engineered than B 450 or B 350 so if you're trying to break some world records or you're just trying to milk every ounce of performance out of your CPU then I would suggest going X 470 if you're spending you know $300 plus on a CPU you probably don't mind spending another 50 to $100 on a motherboard that has greater overclocking capabilities additionally multi-gpu support is available on x4 70 but that's not the case on b4 50 you only get one by 16 support here whereas you get one by 16 and 2 by 8 support on x4 70 so if you drop a second card in there can split the PCIe lanes and you can take advantage of SLI or crossfire considering that most users these days are just dropping a single graphics card into their system and SLI and crossfire aren't even really being advertised much by the chip makers these days this isn't a huge deal for most people so it's really just for if you're trying to go balls to the wall you again trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your board then you're probably gonna want to avoid be 450 and opt for the more expensive platform x4 70 also has a smidge more i/o connectivity than its be 450 counterpart in the way of USB 3.1 gen2 on and it has a few more PCIe lanes both Gen 2 and Gen 3 most users are going to be totally fine with the amount of i/o that supported onboard beat on board on B 450 if you have specific needs as a user then you might need that extra i/o then you're gonna want to opt for X 470 now moving on to the differences between B 450 and B 350 I mean for starters you get support for faster memory speeds with these newer boards and that's actually really important with Rison of course because of the Infinity fabric and how dependent it is on memory frequency so so that's a huge feature improved memory controller faster memory speeds over all the other main benefits of B 450 over its predecessor are mostly software based things like PBO or precision boost overdrive and store my PBO is very similar to XO far and precision boost 2 but it essentially looks at the vrm usage on your motherboard and if there's additional headroom there and provided that your cooling is in check it'll just send more juice to your CPU and basically boost up the frequencies on any number of course it works very dynamically so if you're using if you're running a lightly threaded workload it might only boost one or two cores and that way it'll actually be able to hit higher frequencies whereas if you have a heavily multi-threaded workload or you're gaming in a title that utilizes a bunch of cores then it'll scale all the cores up as long as there's that vrm headroom so it's actually a pretty cool technology it's been announced for a while now but it hasn't been super active or usable it probably will relatively soon it's a future feature or whatever the other thing is store em I store my basically takes two drives presumably one hard drive with a large capacity and an SSD with a smaller capacity pairs them together it shows up as a single drive in your OS and it basically dynamically chooses which files stored on which drives depending on how frequently you use those files so it's it sounds a lot like SSD caching but it's definitely not the technologies enterprise level and it's been around for a while now it works differently in that sense than the Nestea caching but the end result is kind of the same you get a snappier and superior system faster operation all that sort of thing the other great thing about it is that you can you can basically install it or set it up before or after OS installation so that's really nice for and flexible for users who have an existing system and don't want to deal with all the fuss of trying to transfer over their OS or doing a clean install or something like that so now that we've briefly distinguished v4 50 from x4 70 and B 350 let's take a closer look at the motherboard right off the bat I gotta say it's a pretty handsome looking board very typical of what you defined with the ROG boards these days with those sort of silverish grayish charcoal looking aluminum heat sinks we've got a fat one over the vrm and it looks like there's one over the where one of the m2 slots is we'll get to that in just a bit but very color neutral it does have some aura sink lighting I believe on the m2 cover here so overall very attractive so a m4 socket of course fully backwards compatible I should have mentioned that earlier with first generation CPUs even supports you know precision boost to and exif r2 assuming you drop like a 2nd gen rise in cpu in here so that's pretty cool flanking the a m4 socket you get your obligatory pair of ddr4 dimm slots at the top of the board you'll find to RGB headers once a four pin and one's a three pin so you get your choice of not addressable or addressable support therefore your LED strips and devices there are one two three fan headers four pin PWM fan headers that support you know a iOS and pumps and things like that and if we're talking about the BRM since we're here it looks like you've got six phase power for your for your VR M going to your CPU and then one phase power for your SOC so the overall BRM going to your CPU is pretty solid six phases on a mini ITX board I'm digging that the one phase on the SOC is a little concerning I guess what this tells us is that use caution if you're gonna drop a raven Ridge apu in here because the SOC on Rison powers the eye bu or the Vega graphics that are a part of the horizon APU so maybe you wouldn't get the best overclocking potential if you were to drop an APU in here but if you're just dropping you know normal CPU in here you should be good to go with some decent overclocking additionally we've got an arrangement of SATA ports so we've got two SATA ports on the right side of the board and then two more just above the right side of the PCI Express slot which I don't know that seems like it might pose some cable routing issues if you are gonna use those ports they're just at a really awkward spot and they're a little bit more inland on the PCB than than usual you've also got USB 3 which seems to be in a good spot on the the bottom right corner of the board along with USB 2 a single USB 2 header at the very bottom you've got your PCI Express gen3 by 16 slots looking pretty with some some aluminum or metal reinforcements I should say and then there's this this this thing what looks to be an MDOT two shield or or heatsink which I guess we should pop off really quick and take a closer look because this is quite interesting so definitely a heat sink for your MDOT to drive nvme supported PCI Express gen3 by four and all that so there is a thermal pad included with a little sticker on there you removed before you apply it and then we've also got our slot here so the slot is kind of raised up that's because underneath it is a heatsink for the for what I believe is the chipset so I think that's the chipset heatsink underneath there so they've kind of stacked or layered different componentry on top of each other to save space on this very space constricted board which i think is smart this has also got audio built into this little area so not only is it I'm about to board but there's a there's audio at the back as well and it's got LED enhancement or whatever so it shines you know lights up red blue and green to let you know what inputs they are just because you're really fancy and stuff you got 802 11 AC Wi-Fi alongside an Intel gigabit nic 2 USB 3.1 gen2 ports type-a as well as 4 USB 3.1 gen2 also type-a and finally there's an HDMI out with HDR support so if you were to drop an APU in here and you had an HDR supported monitor first of all lucky you you'd be able to take advantage of that high dynamic range capability so that's pretty cool the other thing that I want to show you is the back of the board got a little backplate here but there's another m2 slot look at that just right there on the back this one's just kind of flat with the PCB but this board allows you to actually raid nvme drives nvme MDOT two drives together which is really sweet of course this is gonna be limited to a very small number of users I would imagine but it's kind of cool that you can do that on a mini ITX board so there's a quick gander at the board at this point I'd like to actually get it booted with our Rison 520 600 X and try my hand at some overclocking just to see what the experience and various behaviors are and then we'll circle back and talk about it so be right back alright so I just spent the last hour or two setting up our test bed quite haphazardly I might add but it's functional and the results are pretty good you guys are gonna enjoy it but before we get into that let me quickly go over the hardware that I used here I didn't want cooling to be a limiting factor on our resin 5 2600 X which is again 6 cores 12 threads so we have a cooler master master liquid ml 240 RGB as you can see I did not use any of the RGB because it's pointless and then we also have a pretty fast memory kit from g-scale this is their sniper X ddr4 at 3400 speed which we were able to hit no problem and we also have a fractal design Integra 550 650 watt power supply and a gtx 1050 TI from msi this is simply so that we can have a video output and see what we're doing so all together we were able to achieve a 4.2 gigahertz overclock on all cores and that was at one point three seven five volts within the UEFI that was the first and last voltage value that I that I attempted it just worked I haven't I don't have that much experience overclocking the 2600 X specifically but the temperatures are even fine in case you're curious it just hit 69 woo but it's mostly been within the 60s and 70s we're running rock-solid stable right now approaching half an hour in a 264 or I 264 I would suggest that if you're overclocking and you're gonna run that overclock regularly perhaps on a daily basis that you I definitely spend more than half an hour stress testing your CPU to ensure that your your overclocks rock-solid stable but for the purpose of this vid in the interest of time things are looking really really good it's really nice that we were able to hit 4.2 gigahertz because I've seen most users kind of maxed out at that frequency when overclocking their 2600 X's so it's nice to know that we can actually hit that on a be 450 motherboard Mini ITX nonetheless additionally I would say that this is probably this board is probably the better value over the x 470 equivalent because they seem pretty much exactly the same except for the chipset so unless you really need that extra i/o with you know USB 3.1 gen2 and maybe a couple extra PCIe lanes which I don't think you would in most cases you can't really utilize multi-gpu configurations at all on mini ATX anyway so X 470 doesn't seem to make as much sense in this case but those are my findings on the Asus as note the Asus has rocked the eighth the asus rog Strix B 450 I gaming guys let me know what you think about this board what you think about the B 450 platform as a whole and feel free to toss a like on this video if you enjoyed it you can also get subscribed for more tech videos coming at you really soon and you can check me out on floatplane if you want to watch my videos a week early without ads for 3 bucks a month I'll put a link for that in the video description as always guys thank you for tuning in have a good one and I'll see you all in the next video