Analyzing B450 for AMD Ryzen: A Quick Look at 25+ Motherboards

ASRock B450 Gaming ITX/ac

The B450 Gaming K4 uses similar gunmetal grey heatsinks designs as the B450 Gaming K4, which feature fins to help direct airflow through the channels. The board features support for ASRock’s Polychrome RGB technology, however the B450 Gaming-ITX/ac has no onboard LEDs with the RGB capabilities coming through the same pairing of available headers.

Buy ASRock B450 Gaming ITX/ac on Newegg

The B450 Gaming ITX/ac has a single full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot featuring ASRock Steel Slot protection, and has a total of four SATA 6 Gbps ports with all of them featuring straight angled connectors. For M.2, the Gaming ITX/ac model features a single PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA slot located on the rear of the PCB.

As is usually the case with Mini-ITX form factor motherboards, the ASRock B450 Gaming ITX/ac has a total of two RAM slots giving a maximum supported capacity of up to 32 GB of DDR4. One of the advantages to Mini-ITX is the length of the tracks between the RAM slots and the CPU socket meaning better memory capabilities is possible, which in this case is shown through DDR4-3466 support, compared to DDR4-3200 for the Gaming K4. 

On the smaller form factor Fatal1ty B450 Gaming ITX/ac rear panel is two USB 3.1 10 Gbps ports (Type-A and Type-C), two USB 3.1 5 Gbps ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a HDMI output, a DisplayPort 1.2 output, two antenna ports for the integrated Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi module and a PS/2 combo port. The five 3.5mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output are governed by a high-quality Realtek ALC1220 audio codec, while the LAN port is driven by an Intel I211AT Gigabit networking controller.

Overall, the smaller B450 Gaming ITX/ac compared to the K4 has higher quality integrated controllers and omits any form of built-in RGB. The new ASRock Fatal1ty B450 models directly replace the currently available B350 offerings and as it stands currently, with the B450 Gaming ITX/ac is set to cost $129.99.