You’ll find a user’s manual, AORUS case badge / sticker, SATA III cables and the rear IO cover – and… that’s pretty much it.Based on our experience with the B450 AORUS M throughout the review, we’d say that it’s definitely not the kind of motherboard you would want to get your hands on if you’re really planning on overclocking your system above the average. As for the thermal guard, it’s basically a piece of heatsink for high-speed NVMe SSD which helps to dissipate heat better and minimize the chances of thermal throttling.Just one month ago, Gigabyte unveiled its AORUS branded B450 AORUS Pro and B450 AORUS M motherboards based on the AMD B450 chipset for the AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs.
For those of you who wanted to go for a more budget friendly board for Ryzen CPU which still allows you to overclock the CPU, the B450 AORUS M is okay if you don’t plan to go really high with the clocks.Here’s something which we think most of you would have already noticed – why is this part exposed? Priced at RM429, we’d say it’s still somewhat acceptable for what the B450 AORUS M has to offer.For the rear IO, you’ll have a total of 8 USB ports – 2 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.1 Gen1 and 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 2, DVI-D and HDMI output for Ryzen with Vega graphics, RJ45 Gigabit ethernet port and the audio jacks.Lenovo Malaysia has officially announced the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 AMD, bringing this convertible laptop for those who are looking...Similar to most commonly seen motherboards nowadays, you’ll find the headers for the front panel IO and switches at the bottom right section of the motherboard. So it’s safe for us to say that you can still game on a B450 motherboard with a pretty decent result if you don’t really need those extra fancy features on the higher-end X470 motherboard.As the M in the name suggests, the B450 AORUS M is a mATX form factor motherboard with very minimal aesthetics on it. Now, we’re not really a fan of Gigabyte’s current UEFI design, but that’s just something personal.Apart from that, you’ll find these Japan made audio capacitors, Realtek ALC892 codec, and the isolation with a slight trace of RGB LED path for the audio section on the motherboard. There was also a lot of confusion with regards to my address even though I gave all information required.Excellent motherboard. So, you might not want to go too high with the CPU frequency there – just in case.The included accessories is really, really basic. Now, the numbers might seem to be okay at this point. While it might seems to have a 8+3 phase design – don’t get fooled by the chokes count, a closer look at it reveals that the VRM design is actually 4+3 phase instead of 8+3 phase. While each brands has its own design of UEFI, you’ll still be able to access the rest of the functions after going through the menu for some time. While it’s not entirely a surprise for us to still seeing USB 2.0 headers on the board, but majority of the PC chassis nowadays no longer comes with front USB 2.0 ports for its from IO.That aside, you’ll also find other information i.e the chipset of the motherboard, proprietary features of the motherboard and the usual 3 years warranty from Gigabyte.Despite being a mid-end motherboard, you’ll still find the 8-pin 12V CPU power socket which is meant to ensure sufficient power is supplied to the CPU for better performance, especially when it comes to overclocking.For our test, we are using 3 different CPU (Intel CPU, AMD CPU, AMD APU) to see what kind of impact it has to gaming performance with different memory speed – base frequency of 2133MHz against tested frequency of 3200MHz.Enter your email address to subscribe to Tech-Critter and receive notifications of new posts by email.Storage wise, you’ll have a M.2 slot for your high-speed NVMe SSD, 2 x SATA III port plus 4 x SATA III port for more SATA drives in case if you need more storage.