The ASRock B450 Gaming ITX/ac and B450 Gaming K4 Motherboard Reviews
by Gavin Bonshor on July 31, 2018 10:00 AM ESTCPU Performance
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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Flappergast - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
Again I’m looking at the msi b350 just kicking ass. Can anyone tell me why?mapesdhs - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
"... so while technically there is a 6+3 phase count there, ASRock’s marketing is somewhat misleading."Is this by any chance the same issue that Buildzoid talked about re a particular Gigabyte board?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IjWCOXSuKU
ipkh - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
There is no doubler chip on the board. Linking/Shorting is not the same and shouldn't be conflated with what a doubler actually does.ZolaIII - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
Why on earth would you pair this with an old first gen Ryzen? Long anticipated chipset to drive second gen Ryzen 5's... Very disappointing review.plonk420 - Wednesday, August 1, 2018 - link
thanks for the K4's VRMs!walmart32 - Saturday, August 4, 2018 - link
Please tell us about https://www.walmartnearme.co/Dug - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Can we please get some relevant information on motherboards like in the old days of Anandtech? Hard drive speed tests, lan and wireless tests, sound tests, memory tests, an analysis on why fps is so much lower. You know, the reasons people look at getting one motherboard over another. Plus get a new processor in there. You are using a new generation motherboard.Langers - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link
I'm planning on building a SFF PC with the ITX B450 board and a Ryzen 5 2400G. I've not built a PC for about 8 years so I'm a bit rusty so any help is appreciated. Can anyone recommend which RAM to use? I'd like to go as fast as is supported without overclocking (to start with).Cheers
Langers
bjocan - Saturday, August 25, 2018 - link
A thing that was missed in the article when comparing the Gaming B450-ITX/ac to the X470 version of the same board was that the later has Bluetooth 5.0 while former only has Bluetooth 4.2. Could be significant to some buyers.