Gigabyte B450 Gaming X Motherboard

This is a great motherboard, especially now that it supports Zen 2/Ryzen 3000. No complaints at all so far as it's working flawlessly- and it was great value too, at just £81! As a relative beginner to pc building this was really easy to build on and everything is clearly labelled and easy to use. Only downside (and this is minor) is the slight inconsistency of some of the gigabyte software- e.g. sometimes rgb Fusion doesn't pick up all of my components.

This motherboard was for my mATX case. I used a Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, 16Gb 3000Mhz RAM and a RX580 GPU everything was recognised first time and even when installing Windows I didn't have to tell it to boot from the NVMe drive. The on board LED light strip is not very impressive but I didn't purchase it for that. I haven't over clocked the CPU yet but so far everything is working fine. I was going to buy the Asrock B450m board after reading some reviews, but this board is perfect and brings my build in budget. Also, upgraded the firmware without any problems. Connectivity is excellent as I only have a few USB devices plugged in, the monitor uses the graphics card so irrelevant here. I can't compare it to anything else of this generation as I haven't used anything else.

I used this board for my second Ryzen 5 3600 build and I'm definitely more impressed with this one than my previous MSI Tomahawk B450 Max, which I read everywhere was the best for overclocking. Well, I have found the Gigabyte is in fact better. To be fair, it would well be a better binned CPU but my 3600 on the Gigabyte generally runs the cores 100MHz higher than on the MSI. Running a CPUz stress test on the MSI, all cores stabilise and run at 3975. On this board, 4075! Also, more of the cores boost higher and several will hit 4200 as opposed to just one - and that's quite rare - on the MSI. Using the standard Auto OC on Ryzen Master will also mean that the core boost on this board will actually hit 4400! Setting the same Auto OC on the MSI results in no difference at all. Wow. To top it all, the max CPU voltage is lower on the Gigabyte than the MSI. For info, I have the latest BIOS installed on both. So, it's a great performer. Functionality wise, it's also a pretty good board. Two NVME sockets as opposed to the one on the MSI. The RGB lighting is also far superior, if that's your thing. The BIOS is perfectly good too. The only downside for me is the lack of USB-C. The software utilities are hit and miss. SIV (which controls fan speeds) is really good. The RGB control software is just hit and miss. So, really happy with the board - more so than the more expensive and recommended Tomahawk, It could be the CPU but if I could swap out my Tomahawk for another one of these, I would.

Wonderful motherboard - worked first time. Some things might help you when installing. 1. Although it has great HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, if you, like me, fit a top CPU like the Ryzen 5 3600, remember that this CPU does not have integrated graphics. So there is nothing to drive those on board ports. If you connect up a monitor, you'll of course see nothing. You will need a GPU card and connect the monitor to that. 2. The board has a beautiful back plate with all the printed info for the ports. Remember to put this on before you fit the motherboard into the case!! Really nice board.

I bought the B450 I for use as a Ryzen based Hackintosh build and it works really well. I also use it with Windows 10 but that was not the main reason for purchase. Size-wise the ITX form factor is perfect. I have it installed in a large full tower case, obviously not intended for such a small board but it fits really well. For Windows, everything works straight out of the box. With a Hacktintosh built the Wi-Fi does not work but it rarely does for anything that does not use the Apple standard Broadcom chipset. However for now I use ethernet. Apart from that it is all good and running Catalina 10.15.7 no problem at all. Highly recommended.

Little odd that the star ratings are based on 'warmth' & 'thickness' maybe not the best of individual qualities to pick for a motherboard. And certainly not what comes to mind personally when thinking about buying a board; can only assume 'warmth' is its heat dissipation capabilities which were more than okay. Regardless, it's 5 stars from me, cracking little board with sufficient features given it's MITX form factor, others however maybe left wanting more options for internal drive expandability etc. As for the thickness of the board, it's of good quality, very sturdy; this is helped due to being such a small compact board, no signs of flex around the PCI-E slot with my RTX 2080, which isn't the lightest of cards, chuffed with this.

Bought this to use with Ryzen 5 3600; 16gb ddr4 3200ram; WD sn570 1tb nvme; RTX2060 6gb. Mostly used for photo editing and a bit of video editing as well as ususal internet browsing and home office tasks. Grandchildren also use it for online gaming when they visit. Mostly wanted the ability to have a second nvme drive (now using a second WD sn570 1 tb but eyeing the price of a 2tb) Installation was straightforward and I offset the, then reasonable cost, by passing on my existing MSI B450 motherboard to a friend at a very reasonable price. Will probably add another 16gb of ram in the future but so far I am very pleased with the problem free installation and performance.

Great motherboard that works perfectly with my dads new system with the ryzen 5 1600x up to 4ghz (3.8ghz avg in games) out of the box. Has the io shield already pre-installed which is definitely a good thing. The io shield also lights up which I can't say I've seen that on any ither board but I guess it's kind of cool that it's there. Lighting on the board looks great, you don't need to download any software to change the lighting colours, all ready to go with that in the motherboard bios with the effects. The only con I can think of is the fact that this was shipped all the way from South Africa, but at least it all arrived fine although it did take a week.