Final Thoughts
Price
The ASRock AB350 Gaming K4 AM4 motherboard is currently priced at around £130, making it one of the most expensive B350 motherboards on the market right now, which is a bit of a shame. You can pick up a few from most manufacturers with similar specifications for under £100, but if you shop around, you may get lucky and find it a little cheaper. It does compete with some much more expensive X370 motherboards though, so it’s still pretty good value for money.
Overview
Delivering performance that gives the much more expensive X370 motherboards a run for their money, making it perfect for those who want to unleash a lot of that lovely Ryzen multi-core performance, but would rather not want to spend almost double the price on the motherboard to get there. It’s an odd scenario, where this is an expensive B350 motherboard, but compared to X370, it’s quite cheap.
Overclocking is available on all Ryzen processors, but you need either an X370 or a B350 chipset motherboard to use that feature. This board managed a respectable 4GHz overclock, not quite as high as the 4.05 and 4.1GHz clocks we’ve hit on the more expensive boards, but the VRM isn’t that complex here and tends to get quite hot if pushed too hard for too long, causing system instability. Still, 4Ghz is a great overclock, and pretty common maximum for most people in the silicone lottery for Ryzen.
There are some areas that I would like to see improved on this board, such as the audio performance which does suffer from a bit of noise and for one of the more expensive boards in the B350 market, you would expect it to be better. The range of audio connections are pretty basic too, which seems odd given the board has three video outputs, but doesn’t have a full range of audio connections.
So the board isn’t perfect, but when you’re comparing it to more expensive boards, it’s never going to shine. For now, this board delivers blazing performance and support for 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, dual M.2 SSDs, which are all welcome additions to long-standing AMD users looking for a nice upgrade.
While I’m awarding our bang for buck award today, but with improved audio performance and bringing the price down about 10%, this would have been an editor’s choice award, but it’s still a good value motherboard overall.
Pros
- Good overclocking performance
- Supports 3200 MHz DDR 4
- 3 x display outputs
- Dual M.2
- 6 x SATA
- Easy to use BIOS
- Performance gives some X370 motherboards a run for their money
Cons
- Audio connectivity isn’t great
- Audio performance is pretty average
- Small VRM cooling limits overclocking potential
- A little more expensive than other B350 offerings
“If you’re looking to get your Ryzen thrills without spending crazy money on the X370 motherboards, then B350 is certainly the way to go for most gaming builds. The AB350 is a little more expensive that some, but it’s a great looking board that’s sure to be a compliment to your next system build.”
