MSI B450M Mortar Micro-ATX Ryzen Motherboard Review

Peter Donnell / 6 years ago

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

The MSI B450M Mortar AM4 Ryzen Motherboard is available now from most major retailers. It’s on Amazon for just £100.13, which is pretty decent given the level of features on offer. Sure, there are other solutions that are cheaper. However, for your extra investment you get great overclocking, and a few extra bells and whistles to enhance your system performance and stability.

Overview

I love the B350 version of this motherboard, well enough that I actually bought one myself. The latest version isn’t a world apart in features, but it does have its perks. For starters, it offers out of the box support for the Ryzen 2000 series processors. For those entering the world of Ryzen now, this would be the chipset to go for. You can spend more for X470 series boards, but unless you’re building a pretty extreme system or going for mental overclocks, there’s little benefit in doing so for most consumers.

Performance

Obviously, the performance is better on this motherboard than the last gen. However, much of that comes from us testing it with the new CPUs vs the old ones. Of course, with support for all the latest features of Ryzen 2000 CPUs, this motherboard allows us to unlock that extra performance in a way that B350 couldn’t. With AM4 sockets, you can fit any Ryzen CPU though, which is a huge bonus. Furthermore, the performance in our benchmarks and gaming was the best we’ve seen for B450 so far, making it a great investment.

Connectivity

This is certainly the strong point for this motherboard. On the rear I/O alone, you’re provided a bank of USB ports, Type-C, HDMI, and Display Port. If that wasn’t enough, you also get great audio performance. With gold capacitors, gold-plated jacks, and the fantastic Audio Boost amplifier packing a nice punch on up to 7.1 surround systems. In addition to all of this, you have Turbo M.2, Tube USB 3.1 Gen 2, Store MI, Multi-GPU support, RGB header, and more.

Should I Buy One?

For around £100, you’ll be hard pushed to find more for less. While there are cheaper solutions, there are also plenty of more expensive ones. The B450M is the perfect sweet spot for Ryzen. Furthermore, not only is it one of the best Ryzen motherboards for value, it’s also one of the few in mATX form factor. What’s not to love about that!?