AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards

AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards

AMD launched the Ryzen 2000-series chips a few months ago, but your choices for motherboards have been depressingly limited. There were the high-end (and expensive) X470 chipsets, or you could hope an old board would work. Now, the new B450 chipset opens up powerful features to more price-conscious Ryzen builders.

AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards
AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards
AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards
AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards
AMD’s B450 Chipset Brings Advanced Features to Budget Ryzen Motherboards

The most important feature here support for CPU overclocking, which is rare in a sub-$100 motherboard. This works with all Ryzen chips, whereas Intel restricts overclocking to the high-end chipsets and K-series CPUs. You also get memory overclocking and AMD StoreMI, which lets you pair a spinning hard drive with an SSD to increase its speed. That was an optional add-on for last year’s Ryzen motherboards.

While the B450 has officially only launched this week, a few models from Asus, Asrock, and MSI have appeared for sale at a handful of sites like Newegg. Now, you can get a good selection of B450 motherboards at most retailers. These aren’t necessarily flashy or exciting motherboards, but they’re probably just as functional for most use cases compared to the dolled-up X470 boards that could cost twice as much. If you’ve been on the fence with Ryzen, now could be the time to jump.

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If You Can’t Beat ‘Em: Thunderbolt 3 to Be Rebranded as USB4, Coming 2021
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