Review on 💻 ASRock B450 PRO4 ATX Motherboard by Ryan Lawrence

I paid $89+tax for this motherboard on 07/2020 and so far so good. I paired it with a Ryzen 3600, 16GB Crucial 3200MHz RAM and a 256GB Silicon Valley NVMe. For me it was an upgrade, not a new build; since I already had a GTX 970, power supply, case, CD-Rom and hard drives. I paid $390 for new items including taxes. What an upgrade. I've never owned ASRock products, but I've heard of them. My motherboard box had a sticker that said "Ryzen 3000 Series Ready" and I didn't need to flash the BIOS (July 2020). The complete disassembly through assembly + installation of Windows took an hour and a half. It's easy and cheap. I mostly watch YouTube, but I also occasionally play CSGO and COD, so I wanted to upgrade a PC that can run both max settings, but at a decent price. I never go below 200 fps on max CSGO settings of 1920x1080 and on COD@Max settings I get around 60 fps. I can lower the settings and get over 100fps without any dips. COD has many graphics options. I use Ryzen Master software on Windows to automatically overclock my 3600 to 4.2GHz. Works stably even with a stock cooler; Temperature under load does not exceed 70 ° C. Idle around 45 degrees. I will soon take Hyper 212+. I had the Hyper for 10 years on my previous build and it worked really well at keeping temperatures down; so i will do it again Common sense is that the lower the temperature, the longer the life of the equipment. Just like a car engine. So buy a second cooler. I'm not an overclocking expert and the Ryzen software makes it really easy. I've always hated calculating voltages etc in the BIOS like I was some kind of programmer lol. The Ryzen software also runs OS stress tests for you, which is very handy. However, I had to overclock the RAM in the BIOS settings as it was set to 2000MHz by default; But changing the speed was as simple as clicking the 3200MHz option and off you went. Detected as 3200MHz with CPU-Z and Task Manager. It took 2 minutes. Also, as another reviewer wrote, NVME drives use the same lanes as two SATA ports. So if you have too many SATA drives or SSDs, your NVMEs won't show up in Device Manager or anywhere else. The beauty of this mobo is that it has TWO NVME ports instead of one. Many more expensive boards only have one slot. This setup was sent first and I got it up and running with a bootable flash drive in Windows within 30 minutes. The bios is easy enough to navigate and there is nothing special about it. Set the boot priority and boot order and you're done. Built-in audio works fine. My 10 year old mobo was just as basic so I wasn't expecting anything exceptional, especially for the price. Wanted a budget upgrade. I've never built an AMD rig before, but these Ryzen 3600 processors are monsters for the price. So happy I went with him. Coming from i7 860 with 8GB RAM 1200MHz and ASUS P7P55D-E Pro Board. I hope for another 10 years from this plant. Tip: DO NOT enable the Fastboot option in the BIOS as this will not allow you to return to the BIOS without resetting the CMOS. I did this just to try and then had to jump over the CMOS with a screwdriver to reset the BIOS. I warn you, this is PITA. The battery is under the graphics card, so the screwdriver method was the best option. I'll update the review if something catastrophic happens lol. It's been 4 days so far. No crashes, no freezes. Just smooth sailing at a decent price. say couple happy for me mary------------------------------------ -- --- -----EDIT UPDATE: 05/12/2020 The computer still works. I hooked up a Hyper Evo 212+ CPU and it never went above 55c under load in COD or CSGO. This is madness. 4.2GHz OC'd and never reaches 60C? Are you kidding? Arctic Silver 5 is always key, no crashes so far. Added another 1TB Silicon Power NVMe for CSGO and COD storage. It's pretty unrealistic how fast this PC is for such a cheap one. OC was stable with no issues. game times.