B450: MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock boards review... Hardware Unboxed.

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The selection of £100 mid range Ryzen boards put to the test, including (and i would argue the most important test of boards in this price range) VRM temperature testing

In a sentence: the MSI Tomahawk is best, the Gigabyte Aorus Pro is worst, turns out the Gigabyte is all about looks with really junk VMRs, don't buy it.

 

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I think the MSI is a 4 phase CPU VRM, as is the Aorus but there is a difference between them, the MSI board has 2 high side MosFets per inductor so 8 total, the Aorus has 8 Inductors but only 1 high side MosFet per pair with a doubler, so 4 high side MosFets, that's why the Aorus VRMs run at 120c where as the MSI VRM only runs at 85c under the same conditions, its the high side MosFets that take all the load and the MSI board has twice as many.

 

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Buildzoid, altho he has not done any actual testing on B450 boards 'yet' was also not keep on the Asus Gaming-F, he didn't like the VRMs, his exact words are "awful"

https://youtu.be/yWAwOH-egFs?t=26m27s

I think the MSI Tomahawk is the one to go for. Buildzoid without even testing them agrees.

 

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hope this helps, will post more of the other boards

4200ghz with 1.44v !!!! vs 1.4 volts in the video above

Aorus

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_b450_aorus_pro_review,18.html

MSI

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_b450_tomahawk_review,18.html

I do need to mention that the stock cooler is blowing air over this area.

Which is fine if you're looking to use the stock down-draft cooler which blows air over the VRMs.

I don't think Guru3D understood why people asked them to do VRM temperature testing, had they understood it they would have used an AIO or a horizontal stand up cooler like 90% of people will and probably got very different results.

 

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Right ^^^ and all the B350 / B450 boards largely copies of eachother, the Gaming K4 is the same as the Pro 4 that i have, they are literally just a different colour, the smaller boards are the same as the ATX ones only smaller some also with smaller VRM Heat Sinks, the B450 versions of them are the same as the B350 just with cosmetic tweaks, its cost saving.
Like the MSI board they don't have any RGB, they don't have designer plastic all over them, they don't really look that nice, they look functional.

Compare them to the Asus Gaming-F and Aorus Pro which do look really good are worse where i would argue it matters most, in the VRM department.

But i think that's fine, at the end of the day these are £100 boards, all of them run even the 2700X perfectly fine, as long as you're not overclocking on the Asus and Gigabyte boards.
I just think what we are seeing here are two different approaches, Gigabyte and Asus have budgeted for looks where as MSI and ASRock are all about performance.

At the end of the day board vendors for the bast 5+ years are not used to making mid range boards capable of overclocking, all Intel mid tier Chip-Sets are locked so they didn't need to worry about VRM performance.

 

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90% of AMD sales use stock cooler. only people like us on forum that uses 3RD party coolers and even less with AIO.

ask gibbo or one of sales team and secure they can give rough figure of every full build or cpu bought or combo- did it come with 3rd party cooler.

and with AMD unlike intel- 90% of users dont or wont add a cooler as they'll just let the stock cooler do its job .

im guessings its 1 in every 30 AMD chip sets that has a 3rd party cooler on it .... specially when bought pre-built , from high street or from your average person .

saw figures for Z vs B/H intel chipsets - slightly off topic - but in EU. something like 10-1 is non K boards . half of that is OEM whom either use K chips or non K chips with stock coolers!



worth checking out how its wired to chipset/pcie lanes. having it still at second gen speed is better then nothing and again, most people wouldnt tell difference running max speed

Fair enough, do you think Asus and Gigabyte are treating B3/450 like Intel's H series, which are locked, just make them look nice and don't worry too much about VRM performance?
As i said above there is as much of a difference in the looks of the MSI and ASRock vs Asus and Gigabyte as there is VRM performance, which is fine for the latter two if you're not overclocking, or indeed using after market cooling.