ROG Strix B450-F Gaming

I took the risk and decided to go Ryzen for the first time and was glad I did. I went with the Asus B450-F mainly from the good reviews, affordability and my having settled on a Ryzen 2700x with 16GB of Corsair memory on board. For those who have either never built a gaming PC or are a bit rusty, don't worry, this is a great motherboard and I had only a few small snags in my install, mainly because I was new to the AMD way of doing things and also to the BIOs and a few things it wants when you test your POST for the first time. Just take your time and if you are not sure as to the answer for a question, Google or YouTube it or call the support line for help. I watched the YouTube videos on the Asus board and it all went well save for my little goof-up on POST. The two main takeaways: 1.) Make sure to plug the keyboard and mouse in during your first POST test. I was used to motherboards that didn't require it and that little mistake cost me an hour of scratching my head! And 2.) Put cardboard down in a couple of layers next to the mounting clips for the Ryzen fan/heat sink so you don't run the risk of damaging the motherboard when attempting to clip the heat sink to the motherboard. Make sure to use the motherboard cardboard box as a nice testing stand for your motherboard while you run the first POST test before installing it all into the case... This is experience talking. The Ryzen CPU came with the thermal compound applied and while I usually use my own brand, I opted to go with the pre-applied compound and it went great. I will, however, change the compound in six months or so to see how it is doing and replace it with Arctic Silver compound I normally use. As far as the installation of the CPU went, it was perfect. I handled the CPU by the edges and was super gentle in my install. Having had bent CPU pins in the past, I was in NO hurry here and triple-checked to insure all was as expected before I moved on to lock down the CPU and install the heat sink/fan. Power supply was a Corsair CX series 750 watt power supply that was specified in the Asus list of compatible power supplies. Really nice bit of kit there and I liked the ability to plug in ONLY the cords I needed to for my setup. Worked just great right off the bat. I opted for a Rosewill Cullinan RGB case with the fancy smoked glass sides and front panel and love how it all looks with the RGB fans with a fan hub/controller. I'm still figuring out if I can link the RGB hub up to the motherboard to take advantage of the Aura Sync system built into the motherboard. I rather do like the neat RGB lighting built into the motherboard and have yet to test the software that is freely available for Aura Sync. I did have to add 2 standoffs to the case where the motherboard attaches to get full coverage for the motherboard and other than that, it was all smooth sailing on the installation. As for a graphics card, I opted for the ZOTAC Gaming GeForce GTX 1650 OC 4GB. It is performing well so far. All of my gaming systems have used Zotac cards and I have enjoyed how well they work in the prior two gaming systems I have built. We'll see how this new one works, but so far, in the 3 days of burn-in I've done, it has held up. I downloaded the drivers from Zotac's site and the drivers and support software installed with no troubles. I will likely add 2 more sticks of memory on-board to take the system to 32gb and see how it all goes. I'm a retired IT professional who did a LOT of server installs in my day. I would recommend a nice set of tools like a simple needle-nose plier set, some mid-sized screwdrivers (phillips and flat head) plus a magnetic base to hold all the screws you will inevitably be working with. It's best to have them all in one place and impossible to lose. Expect to budget 4 or 5 hours to the build and likely it'll spread over a couple of days. As I mentioned earlier, I do a one week burn-in for my systems and it is a good test of the hardware. You can get away with 24 hours, but I like to see the system truly get exercised for that full week to insure all is good. So... In conclusion: What did I think of the Asus B450-F? So far, it is running great! The normal learning curve for a new type of motherboard and brand. Not too many surprises other than the POST requirement for a mouse and keyboard attached. I am pleased with how it all integrated. I'll update this review over time, but with 3 days so far in the burn-in time, the system is working like a dream and the motherboard temps are running low and the system boots in 15 seconds flat to login screen. I'm giving this motherboard a BUY rating and a thumbs-up.

I'm using this with the Ryzen 3600 with 16gb 3200mhz ram and a GTX 1080Ti SC. Everything on stock speeds. TLDR: Awesome gaming set up. :) Playing triple A games at the highest visual settings at 1080p or even 1440p has been great. Some people have been hyperbolic about the whole voltage regulator modules (VRM) being toasty. Not a problem what so ever. I live in hot Arizona and the heat does not diminish performance by any visible means nor does it catch on fire or melt your board lol. Also, it is extremely easy to apply small aluminum passive heat sinks over them if you are worried about the heat. Which you shouldn't be in this case. It's capable of withstanding these temps and on my system, I do have an over head fan blowing down on the board which helps push out the heat through the back vent fan. As far as everything else goes, I find this to be a very affordable, beautiful and well made motherboard (provided you didn't get screwed at QC which is possible with any parts you buy). I've been playing lots of games with it and also editing some 1080p movies, which was also very nice. I honestly have no complaints. I did try overclocking my Ryzen and that ran well too, but I put it back to stock because I just didn't see any reason to bother with it. Everything ran beautifully at stock settings. The LED light symbol is neat and I like that I can change the colors to static or various color patterns via the Asus software you download online. The software seems to work well. The little label plate thing on what looks to be the north bridge area, is imho, pointless. They could have just left that blank. The GPU covers it almost entirely. I mean, I suppose if you buy a smaller gpu, then perhaps you'll be able to see it. I don't get to enjoy that view with my standard sized 1080ti. In conclusion, it's a budget board that feels like a 300.00 plus board. I don't even want to call it "budget" because I've had more expensive boards that weren't as impressive as this one. The bios settings are very nice and you can update your firmware directly from the bios screen with a jump drive. All inputs worked perfectly. Sata hard drives, etc, are all good. I definitely recommend it. PS before using a 1080ti gpu, I was using a GTX 960 and even then, gaming and editing performance was great.

The motherboard is a great board for a functional low hassle motherboard. The best feature of this board is the Q-LED. It is quickly able to troubleshoot hardware problems that are normally very challenging to find. An example is if using an old video card it will appear not to POST and the VGA light with be amber. The PCI Express one PCI_1 slot is actually set to PCI express 3.0 when set to auto. 3.0 is not backward compatible with 2.0 cards. It will have the VGA light as if your card does not work. The problem is that it "does not work", does not mean the card is broken. The easy fix is just to move card down to PCI_2 and that system should POST. The Q-LED is a really great helping in troubleshoot by narrowing down the potential issues as hardware issues are challenging. It may seem minor, but there are many potential problems that can occur when building a new system as I thought the RAM of CPU could be faulty. The system is partially compatible with Ubuntu 18.04, but not really. Not entirely sure why, but it would randomly freeze for no reason. It could be in use or not, but it would just freeze where nothing would work. The network card was detected as gigabit but the bandwidth utilization was a closer to 100mb speed. Was forced to use Windows 10 and system is stable. The network card operating at detected speed and random system freezing has gone away. Not sure if a big deal, but if you install Windows, it does auto inject the ASUS Grid requesting you to install the software. I installed then uninstalled due to not useful. Not a fan of general gamer advertising, if it were more focused on hardware then it might be useful. The random crashing could have been caused from ASUS Grid injecting into the Ubuntu platform trying to use Wine, but no proof of that. The locking up of the system was after I installed Wine on Ubuntu, so it could be possible, but haven’t gone back to troubleshoot. If ASUS was not injecting software into your computer from the BIOS that would be nice. If this is true having the ability to turn off ASUS grid would be great. BIOS was not updated: I was not forced to update BIOS, but it was not updated upon receiving the item. I was able to update the BIOS with no issues. It may seem slow… because it is, just wait for it to do what it needs to do. It appears to be frozen with no progress, but it isn’t. It is best to walk away and check on it every so often. I used a 2000 series cpu, so no problems here. RAM Profile was clocking my RAM at 2600 when it detect it as 3200 ram. Wasn't sure how to get what I paid for but accidentally went to easy mode and had it auto detect recommended configuration. It build a profile to allow my ram to run at 3200 with the different timing and voltage profile. Seems to be working fine now. The LED isn’t overly bright, so I use it to tell if the computer is still on. I didn’t like the power button on my case because it is so bright, so the LED inside the case is just bright enough to see that it is on. Overall still think this is a great board. I would prefer to save money by being on Linux, but having to use Windows is fine too, just cost more. The only non BIOS or compatibility recommendation is to test components outside the case before installing. Due to some of my late errors it was more challenging to use a flashlight to check components.

Awesome kit, still in use on 2025, everything has worked flawlessly, will definitely buy ASUS again

Amazon review-combining-proofing: Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming Motherboard (ATX) AMD Ryzen 2 AM4 DDR4 (I'll stop doing this when Amazon stops combining reviews for unrelated products) Disclaimer: I am NOT a PC gamer. I did not get this board for gaming. The only PC game I play is The Sims 2 (which runs just fine on this board, but that's more to do with the new graphics card I installed) and Bluestacks. I bought this board because I was using an inherited PC that was over 10 years old, and wanted something a bit more modern since I use my PC as a Plex server, and it was struggling to play HD videos. I wanted something at least as good as my laptop (which has a faster processor), but that wouldn't break the bank. I settled on this MB, an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 2 sticks of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (16GB), and an ASUS ROG Strix RX570 O8G. I didn't spend as much as a lot of PC gamers brag they spent on their rigs, but I'm satisfied with what I've got. Installation was easy. I have plenty of experience building and upgrading PCs, but haven't built my own PC since around 2008 or so. Still, everything is easy to find on this board, and the manual is better than some I've seen at showing (for example) the CPU/heat sink/fan installation, and showing the best memory configurations. The board layout is better than some I've seen, including the MSI MB this replaced. Cable management is incredibly easy, as very few things plug into the center of the board. The SATA ports are partially covered by the GPU in the first PCI-E slot , but they're angled so they can still be used, unlike the MSI board, where half of the SATA ports are unusable with the GPU in place. I don't have much use for flashy crap like the RGB, but I will say that since everything I bought for this build supports RGB (including the fans), I went ahead and hooked it up, because why not? I figured I could always disconnect it if it got too obnoxious. Even if you don't install the Aura software, you can disable/enable the RGB in the BIOS at startup. I decided to go ahead and install the software, and see what additional options it gave. I had tired pretty quickly of the lights shifting colors constantly after an hour or so. The Aura software provides more lighting options, as well as synchronizing the two RGB headers. I switched to the "Music" setting, as that makes the lights pulse with my music (and any other sounds, I later found out). The drawback is that if I turn off the monitor (or switch it over to my XBox One), it turns off the RGB, resetting it, so I have to go into the Aura software again and change my settings, then change them back. Still, that's a minor complaint, since I don't really care about the lighting, anyway. What's important is how it works. It works just fine. I had some problems initially, with the USB drivers, but more about drivers later. Basically, I can do everything I did before, but smoother and/or faster. There's not much I can say other than it works, and in most cases, works better than my old system. The only case where it's worse is with my front-panel card reader. When I got my driver problem sorted, it worked fine -- until I turned off the power. Every time I booted up after that, the drivers would load, not work, and the entire system would be tied up in turning the card reader slots on and off, until I disabled them. I mainly only use the USB port on the card reader, and THAT is unaffected. But I can no longer use the card reader with my SD cards. Now for the driver problems. I can't say how Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 handle the drivers. I run Windows 7 Professional. I have tried windows 8 and hated it. I was running Windows 10 for over a year, and had to get rid of it when Microsoft decided to force updates even when you're on a metered connection. Besides, I already wasn't happy with 10. So I refuse to downgrade my computer to newer versions of Windows. I'm happy to say, my Windows 7 install is chugging happily along on the new MB and CPU. The hard part is getting the chipset drivers, because the newer Ryzen processors don't support Windows 7. They DO exist, but AMD and Asus make it hard to get them. You will also need a ps/2 mouse or keyboard, because Windows 7 does not natively support USB 3.x. You need amd_chipset_software_2.04.28.626.exe -- run the installer to get most of the missing drivers, then point Device Manager to C:\AMD\Chipset_Driver_Installer\AMD_Chipset_Drivers to get the remaining USB Host Controller driver. It's not that difficult. The difficulty was in figuring this out, as searching online showed lots of people who had the same problem, but only a few shared their solution -- and those solutions were only partially successful, or in many cases didn't work at all. Anyway, once you've got the chipset drivers installed, you'll be able to go back to your USB mouse and keyboard. TL;DR: Easy to install and to manage cables. Works fine, even for non-gamers. Easy to set up, even for Windows 7 users (as long as you have the chipset drivers).

I really like the Asus Rog Strix B-450-F Gaming II ATX motherboard. It has 2 RGB headers: one 5v 3pin and the other with 12v 4 pin plus 2 M.2 slots. I have not used the RGB headers yet so I’m not sure how it works. I think the previous generation (B-450-F Gaming) does not have the 5v 3pin RGB header. The I/O shield is already pre-mounted which makes it easier to put into the case. I currently use Ryzen 5 3600x, 16GB (2x8GB) DD4 3200MHz memory ram (V-Color brand). Its 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors are already done so I don’t have to update any bios for it to work. This is my first time using Asus motherboard and so far I have only a few problems. What bothers me is their software constantly appearing on the desktop screen (see picture). Even if I move it off my desktop screen, I still accidentally click on it while playing games which takes me to the icon. Then when I switch back to my game I’m already dead; it’s very annoying, best to right click on the icon and exi. Another problem I have is on the Sonic Studio 3 app: I cannot login to my account! This link is the same Asus products register account, which I already have one. I created a different email address and password through Sonic Studio 3 and it still didn’t work! I don’t know if any of you have ever had this problem. As others mentioned and stated on Asus details, when using M.2 SSD, the board disables SATA ports 5 and 6 which leaves you with only 4 SATA ports. I saw a reviewer mention that his customer somehow lost all the SATA on the B-450-F Gaming motherboard (that the reviewer himself built) and blamed the motherboard. I found the solution to re-enable the SATA ports when I clicked “Load Optimized Defaults” (pictured) inside the bios on saving to make sure my memory ram and CPU were back to stock after playing with. The CPU and memory ram does reset back to stock, but it also DISABLES ALL the SATA ports including the M.2 slots. As a result, when the computer starts up, it looks for a hard drive or operation system (which I already installed and was working fine). I wondered why my operation system was gone. No matter how many times I restarted my computer, the screen showed “missing operation system”. After 15-20 minutes of trouble shooting I realized that I clicked on “Load Optimized Default” disabled the SATA ports and m.2 slots. To solve this, go to Advanced mode (pictured) and “Enable” the SATA port(s) and m.2 slots. Otherwise they will completely disappear and you’ll think it’s the motherboard’s fault. In my point of view, this motherboard is too advanced. The Load Optimized Default setting SHOULDN’T DISABLE the SATA ports and M.2 slots. I hope that with the new bios update, Asus will fix this problem. If not, new users might blame the motherboard as being defected or broken. I don’t know why newest motherboard (including this motherboard) still using USB 2.0. I haven’t has any problem of the device(s) even though it stated USB 2.0, I plug into USB 3.0 without any problems. Overall I recommend this motherboard to anyone.

-UPDATE- After receiving an approved Boot Kit by AMD (Athlon 200GE), I was able to POST the motherboard and find out that the motherboard was actually on the factory default BIOS version (ver. 0207) and managed to update it to the most recent version (ver. 2501). But enough on that, onto the review. PROS: The board itself is really nice in terms of detail and build quality, the I/O shield in the back is built in with the motherboard to allow easy installation if you don't want to put a shield on the back of the case. Compatibility for the recently released Ryzen 3000 series processors offers this motherboard as a solid alternative for enthusiasts who are looking to upgrade or build their first Custom PCs. CONS: A few notable things from my experience using this after 5 days (even though it would make this review null and void) is the audio engine itself. When I was using the ASUS Pro Gaming Aura 970 since 2016, I was fairly comfortable using the Realtek HD Audio Manager when it had Loudness Equalization, since I loved mixing my music with the games I played if I didn't like the current game music, this motherboard's Sonic Suite III Menu is a different experience but doesn't have a Loudness Equalization, unless you're including the Smart Volume which doesn't make it better for me. (If there's an alternative, please leave a comment below and I'll get to you soon). Other thoughts: On my experience, combined with a Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB DDR4-3200mhz and a Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 GPU, I saw all of this as a massive upgrade from an old FX-8350. Worth the wait and the effort doing this upgrade on a budget. Although audio is a concern and such, this isn't enough to bring down the rating on the review. If you're on a tight budget and need something solid and efficient, this motherboard will be enough for your needs.

This motherboard is awesome. Whether you're experienced at building PC's or looking to build your first, I highly recommend this board. One of the main reasons I like this mobo so much is the fact that it offers both HDMI AND DP. Most boards that offer support for both are significantly more expensive and still have equivalent or less features than this mobo. It looks great with the ASUS logo having addressable RGB and the built in IO shield is honestly something I think all manufacturers need to start doing. One of the other perks of this mobo is the fact that it offers so many features you usually have to give up with other boards in this price range. Not to mention that it was compatible with Ryzen 7 3700x right out of the box, no BIOS updating needed. That brings me to my next perk, which is the BIOS. Personally I think ASUS has one of the best looking and most tweakable BIOS' out there. It allows you to tweak basically anything your heart desires and in a user friendly way with easy to navigate pages and tabs. Over all, if you're looking for a great mobo for your hard earned green backs, I would highly recommend the ROG Strix B450-f Gaming motherboard for its down the line upgradability and premium features that don't cost as much as a top of the line GPU.