PRIME B450M-A II, AMD B450 (Ryzen AM4) Micro ATX Motherboard with M.2 Support, HDMI/DVI-D/D-Sub, SATA 6 Gbps, 1 Gb Ethernet, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, BIOS FlashBack™, Aura Sync RGB Lighting Support

Being an Aberdonian, I'm happy to spend hours of my free time saving a few quid. Meaning, research. I want value for money. Meaning all the features, cheap, and futureproofing to boot. After all that, I end up buying /this/ board. Note: I was only looking for an mATX board (to fit my current case) and didn't consider any regular ATX boards.. This is everything I could want from series 5 Ryzen board. 32GB RAM in slot one (of four) is plenty for now, but no doubt double that will be standard a few years on. This board will still be viable. And by then, those 5000 series mega-chips (5950X, et al) will be cheaper and this board can handle them all. Built-in NVMe is FAF (gen 4). I installed Windows 11 in around three minutes to an SK Hynix Platinum P41 1TB M.2 in slot one. Read speeds from the M.2 are insanely fast. To give you an idea; the largest stable diffusion models (e.g. Deliberate V5) are loaded and running in under ONE second. This slot has no heatsink. I guess it's because they reckon you will want a custom heatsink for your primary drive. If you have a P41, you will *definitely* want one. I ended up with a SNOWMAN cooler, which works superbly (prevents throttling) and looks beautiful on this motherboard. The BIOS is complex (it thankfully defaults to simple view, though you can also have it default to advanced, which is handy when tweaking). Loads of stuff in there I haven't heard of (yet), but it was simple enough to overclock my CPU and RAM. Kingston Fury Beast 32GB DDR4 3200MHz happily runs at 34000Mhz with no effort on my part except selecting this in the BIOS . Not that I need overclocking now. Setup was effortless. I dropped in a stick of RAM (in slot B.2, as per the manual) and M.2 storage, slammed in my Windows 11 (£22 at SocialStack) flash drive and (around three) minutes later I'm running Windows. The board layout is logical enough. The components are of good quality (some /very/ good quality) and the whole board feels weighty and solid. It came with a backplate, SATA cable and a heap of stickers I'll never use, but hey, free stickers! Packaging was all cardboard, which we like. Also the BIOS update facility. Very nice. No CPU required; just insert the stick and press the button for three seconds. Clever stuff. I have six drives attached to this motherboard; two on USB 3, three on SATA and one (System drive) on the NVMe. As well as a USB 3 hub with multiple peripherals attached. No dropouts or errors anywhere. This board takes whatever you throw at it. Gaming is flawless. My eldest has tried a few of the latest titles (everything max - RTX 3060) and he's impressed. Jealous, even! After a week of trouble-free use, I'm impressed, too. I think this is a bargain and a great board on which to build your current (and future) Ryzen platform.

Bought this for my project of building a newer PC to replace my 12 year old desktop. Decided to switch to AMD so had to do a lot of research on which motherboard to select as there are a lot of motherboards out there at a range of prices and with a variety of different features. Chose the Asus TUF Gaming B650 plus wifi as it had good reviews in general and it has a lot of features. It has built in wifi, which was essential for me and this has performed really well. I haven't had any problems with the onboard wifi. The sound quality provided by the motherboard is crisp and clear. Could it be better, yes, but with the speakers I have and at this price you can't get much better. There are plenty of M.2 connections and they all have heat sinks to keep them cool and help them running correctly and not overheating. Also, there are numerous USB 3.2 connections available as well as Type-C so should be suitable for all. All-in-all this is a well built motherboard with a lot of features and is at a reasonable price now that AM5 boards have started dropping in price.

The motherboard was bought to replace an MSI B650m Mortar wifi that was broken (either it was the BIOS update or faulty memory controller that got it) The Asus TUF Gaming B650 Plus is a good replacement, I particularly like the extra slots of the atx board and the fan curve presets work well - for £165 it is good for the price at the time of purchasing. ***if you are having trouble installing the bluetooth and wireless network drivers, there are 2 different drivers on the Asus site for this board, one for Mediatek and one for Realtek, my board used the Mediatek drivers which was only visible when clicking on ‘see all’ on the page*** As for the add on software ‘Armoury Crate’ and ‘MyAsus’, I have found that these are not needed for my uses and actually used a fair amount of resources to run. The software was easy to use and lets me tweak overclocking settings, fan speed settings, RGB lights and can help with downloading and installing drivers - but I can change the settings from the BIOS (apart from the RGB settings) and you can find the drivers on the motherboard webpage. After uninstalling the both armoury crate and MyAsus, I found in services.msc that there were several Asus services that were still enabled (I suspect these relate to the MyAsus support app) so I disabled them as these were also taking resource, so keep an eye out for these if removing the software. I guess the Armoury crate software could be useful for a beginner in terms of installing drivers, but would suggest not keeping it installed due to the resource usage, and the software terms means they collect lots of data about the system, including games installed, hardware used, overclocking settings, screen resolution etc. which I think is a bit excessive just to change settings that are already available in the bios (not sure about the RGB settings as I didn’t need them) Compared to my old MSI board, the wireless hardware is a bit weaker, previously I was able to use bluetooth headphones with a wireless controller connected via the motherboard, however I was not able to do this with the Asus board and need to use the USB receiver for the controller. Once all the software was removed, the performance is good, the chipset, processor and memory is the same as my old MSI board so this was expected, however it is very nice to have a computer that boots correctly every time and in a few seconds rather than minutes!

I don't know a lot about motherboards, but I got this one for my first build, and everything went smoothly

Average product...

Superbe carte mère couplé avec un ryzen 5 5500 gt et 16 giga de mémoire, tourne du feu de dieu.

Ich habe das Asus Prime B450M-A II für einen gebrauchten Gaming-PC mit einem Ryzen 5 5600 gekauft, und es läuft seit dem ersten Start absolut stabil. Die Verarbeitung ist hochwertig, alle Anschlüsse sitzen fest, und der Einbau ging problemlos von der Hand. Was mir besonders gefällt: Das BIOS ist übersichtlich und einfach zu bedienen, auch für Leute, die nicht täglich PCs zusammenbauen. Ich konnte problemlos meinen DDR4-RAM mit XMP aktivieren, und die M.2-SSD wurde sofort erkannt. Trotz des kompakten mATX-Formats bietet das Board alles, was man braucht – genug USB-Ports, einen M.2-Slot, HDMI und sogar gute Lüftersteuerungsmöglichkeiten. Auch die Spannungsversorgung ist für Mittelklasse-CPUs absolut ausreichend. Ich nutze den PC jetzt seit mehreren Monaten als zweit-Rechner zum Arbeiten und Spielen – kein einziger Absturz oder Problem. Für den Preis bekommt man hier wirklich viel Qualität und Stabilität.

This has been a great, dependable and easy to set up motherboard. Would recommend for anyone wanting to do an AM4 build