ASRock ATX Motherboard (B450 PRO4)

I paid $89 + tax for this motherboard 07/2020 and so far so good. I paired it with a Ryzen 3600, 16gb of 3200MHz Crucial RAM, and a Silicon Valley 256gb NVMe. This was an upgrade for me, not a new build; as I already had a GTX 970, PSU, case, CD-Rom, and storage hard drives. I paid $390 shipped w/ tax included for the new stuff. What an upgrade. I've never owned an ASRock product before, but have heard of them. My motherboard had a sticker on the box that it was "Ryzen 3000 Series Ready" and I did not have to flash the BIOS (July, 2020). Total disassembly through reassembly + windows install was an hour and a half.It's simple, and cheap. I mostly browse YouTube but also casually play CSGO and COD so I wanted a PC upgrade that could handle both max settings, but for a decent price. I never dip below 200fps in CSGO 1920x1080 max settings and COD @ Max settings I get around 60fps. I can lower the settings and get well over 100fps without any dips. There are a ton of graphics options with COD.I use the Ryzen Master software in Windows to Auto-OC my 3600 to 4.2GHz. It's stable even with the stock cooler; it never gets over 70C under load. Idles around 45C. I'll be picking up a Hyper 212+ soon enough. I've had a Hyper on my previous build for 10 years and it worked really well to keep temps down; so I'll be doing it again. It's common sense that the lower your temps, the better the lifespan of the hardware. Just like a car engine. So buy an aftermarket cooler. I'm no overclocking expert and the Ryzen software really makes it simple. I always hated figuring out voltages, etc in the BIOS like I'm some computer programmer lol. The Ryzen software also stress tests the OC for you, which is neat.I did have to overclock the RAM in the BIOS settings though, as it defaulted to 2000MHz; but changing the speed was as simple as clicking the 3200MHz option and off we go. Recognized as 3200MHz w/ CPU-Z and Task Manager. Took 2 minutes.Also, as another reviewer posted, the NVME drives share the same lanes as two of the SATA ports.. so if you have an excessive number of SATA disk or SSD drives your NVME's will not show in device manager or elsewhere. The nice part of this mobo is that it has TWO NVME ports instead of just one. Lots of higher priced boards only have one slot.This setup POSTed first shot and I was up and running in windows within 30 min using a bootable flash drive. The bios is simple enough to navigate, and is nothing fancy. Set the boot priority and boot order and you're good to go. Onboard sound works fine. My 10 year old mobo was just as simple so I wasn't expecting anything fancy, especially for the price. I 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 it. Coming from an i7 860 w/ 8gb of 1200MHz RAM and an ASUS P7P55D-E Pro mobo. I hope to get another 10 years out of this setup.Word of advice is DO NOT enable the "quick boot" option in the BIOS as it allows no way to get back into the BIOS without resetting the CMOS. I did it just to try it, and then had to jump the CMOS with a screwdriver to reset the BIOS. Just be forewarned it's a P.I.T.A. The battery is located under the graphics card so the screwdriver method was the best optionI'll update the review if anything catastrophic happens, Lol. Been 4 days so far. No crashes, no hiccups. Just smoooooth sailing at a decent price. Say a couple hail Mary's for me-------------------------------------EDIT UPDATE: 12/5/2020Computer still running strong. I put a Hyper Evo 212+ on the processor and it never goes above 55c under load in COD or CSGO. It's insane. 4.2GHz OC'd and never reaches 60C? You kiddin me? Arctic Silver 5 is always keyNo crashes thus far. Added another 1TB Silicon Power NVMe to store CSGO and COD on. Pretty unreal how fast this PC is for so cheap.OC has been stable no problemo. Hours of gaming.

One of the most important things about a motherboard is that the manual provides clear instructions on how to install the board. A paper copy of the Quick Installation Guide is provided in the box with the motherboard and it does an adequate job of walking you through the installation. Now once you have the board installed and all of the connections made the Quick Installation Guide is finished. All of the Bios settings and device driver installation information is not in the Quick Installation Guide. The User's manual is on the supplied driver disc or it can be found online at the Asrock website. Overall the installation was fairly easy. The motherboard has all of the options that I needed and everything works just fine. I am very happy with the motherboard and would consider purchasing it again.

works great with a Ryzen 5 2600x and a (2x8GB) 16GB Crucial Balistix Sport LT 2400mhz (SR)Most of the Bios settings were already where I wanted them, the only things I had to do was turn off Onboard Audio and the Com Port, and set the correct Boot Order for the Optical Drive and OS driveOne thing I did however run into was one of my SSD's weren't running at the proper speed because ports SATA 3 and 4 share the speed of the Bottom M2 slot, so if your SSD is underpeforming just move it to a different port and it will solve the problem.Overall a great motherboard for the price

This board is great for the price. BIOS may not be the best, but it's navigable. Note for asrock boards though, unless they state you need a certain bios update, it's best to keep whatever revision you have at the moment. For example, if you're running 1st/2nd gen ryzen, if you update to a certain revision, it just breaks your stock boost speeds. That bios was meant specifically for the 3rd gen chips, and they say so on their site. Luckily, I was able to downgrade from that version to get stock speeds up again.For those with 3rd gen chips, the bios on this board has not gone past the 1.0.0.3ABB agesa, so beware that the updates for the latest agesa (the one that fixes the 3rd gen bugs) is not yet available for this board, as of December 2019.