AMD officially unveils the Ryzen B450 chipset
AMD's B450 chipset and associated motherboards are now official. The B450 succeeds the B350 series and brings premium features such as Precision Boost 2, XFR 2.0, SenseMI, and StoreMI support, normally expected to be the domain of the flagship X470 chipset, to mainstream users. Commemorating today's launch is the announcement of close to 25 motherboard models from the likes of MSI, ASRock, Asus, and Gigabyte.
The upgrade from a B350 to a B450 is not jarring by any means. Nothing has changed with respect to USB connectivity, storage, or PCIe lanes. A PCIe 3.0 x16 lane is available from the SoC, which means this chipset is suitable for single GPU setups. There is no CPU PCIe bifurcation — that is still the dominion of the more expensive X470. The addition of StoreMI enables mixing and matching the RAM, SSD, and HDD combination to create the fastest possible access to data.
The best thing about the B450 is that it supports overclocking on all supported Ryzen CPUs. AMD showed off a slide detailing that its competition (Intel, of course) supports overclocking (CPU and memory) only on the higher Z370 and Z270 chipsets. With AMD, however, even low-end B450 motherboards will get overclocking support. In fact, even the company's lowest tier A320 chipset supports memory overclocking. Intel's low-end H300-series allow memory overclocking up to 2400 MHz only when paired with an unlocked 'K' series CPU.
Motherboards featuring the B450 chipset are now available in a variety of form factors across different price points (most B450 boards are available under US$150) making the chipset a compelling option to those who like to have mainstream performance without sacrificing too much.
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