GIGABYTE B450 AORUS M (AMD Ryzen AM4/Micro ATX/M.2 Thermal Guard/HDMI/DVI/USB 3.1 Gen 2/DDR4/Motherboard)

So i bought this motherboard to replace my Asrock b450m Steel Legend,after lots of problems with Asrock and lies about supported XMP memory plus Asrock destroyed four M.2 SSD drives in one year !!!!I got fed up, since ive already got a mini pc from Gigabyte and was quite satisfied with the quality, stablity and support ive decided to swap my motherboard from my gaming rig with Gigabyte B450 AORUS M.Positive:- actually supports XMP that they claim to support and works flawless.- PCIex slots are better placed duo the fact that the M.2 SSD is placed right under the GPU- PCIex x1 not usable when installing graphics card- PCIex x4 usable with graphics card installed- M.2 SSD slot is fitted with heatsink (i decided not to use since my case is well ventilated)- BIOS is less fancy but actually does what it supposed to do.- Plenty USB ports and better placed (2x USB2.0 / 4x USB 3.1 gen 1/ 2x USB 3.1 gen 2)Negative:- lack of fan headers 2 sys fan, 1 cpu fan header (you'll need to use splitters)- no water pump header (if you use an AIO cpu cooler you already lose 3 connectors)- only 1 M.2 slot- finicky M.2 slot, difficult to install and you need to install the spacer under the SSD (took me 2 tries because the first boot the SSD was not found duo bad contact and had to re-seat the drive)So far i had around 1 week to test out this board and i'm already more satisfied then with the Asrock board.I didn't need to reinstall all windows but i did had to re-activate windows, everything just ran and started fine without any problems after swapping the board.I let it run for 2 days non stop, without any hickups or crashes.I ordered some fan header splitters because the lack of connectors on the board.The user manual is significantly smaller but explains very well how to install and configure.The board came with BIOS version F60 and ran my Ryzen 2600x out of the box.Will certainly buy Gigabyte again !

Few years later and still using it. The BIOS is not the best but still does the job. I love it. It does not come with wifi

This board is exactly what I was looking for when planning out my 2U server based Proxmox cluster. I needed an AM4 socket micro-ATX board with both PCIe 16x and PCIe 4x slots and 6 SATA 3 ports. for a SATA SSD based build (vs NVME) this offers the potential for up to 6 SATA 3 drives. Although that drops to the typical 4 if you install and NVME drive.With Ryzen APU chips being sold for a huge premium, I was able to save money over going APU by buying an base PCIe 4x video card (low performance, thes are home lab servers) and combine that with Ryzen 5 1600 CPUs, the new AF code versions, and get great performance at a low cost. I own four servers based these mainboards with that combination now.I did need to upgrade the bios to the latest F50 bios for the board to correctly work with the PCIe network cards I am using and for XMP support correctly for the 64 GB of low budget pc3200 RAM I purchased for each server. Prior to the update the RAM would only work at the stock 2133 speed and the two extra network cards per server were showing up as available within the OS, but were not functional. After the bios update everything is working exactly as it should.For the money these seem to be a great choice with a unique combination of features. For a gaming PC there would be a lot of alternatives to this board, but for a budget home lab server this board is boss.

as of right now im typing from the computer I put this board in. I pulled my 3year old am3+ board from my 2006 alienware aurora area 51 sleeper project and installed this am4 board with 16gigs ddr4 ram and a ryzen 5 2600 processor. my evga GTX 1080 needed a cure for it's bottleneck. Iv'e got a scythe 120mm heat pipe cooler that was originally on my am3+ board and I was able to literally move the mounting brackets from one gen board right to the other. installing windows 10 was easy. I left all the original bios settings alone. this motherboard is set to boot in legacy mode by default which might be a pain for users with integrated graphics on their processor. im fine with legacy because I plan on installing linux on the side of windows 10 later on anyway. I used my memorex usb cd/dvd drive to install windows, I set it to legacy memorex in the bios first boot priority. I reinstalled steam but haven't gotten a chance to play a game on it yet. it's wicked fast with the processor I chose for it running on a 500gb ssd. the board does have rgb but I left that alone too because you cant see into my computer anyway. lol, these am4 motherboards are getting scarce during the corona pandemic and im so glad to get one brand new. 5 stars!Note: you really don't need the driver disk that comes with this board. I kept it but I didn't use it andeverything works fine without it.Edit : I have not at all flash updated the bios on this motherboard. It came with bios version f50, I'm hoping that bios is compatible with the ryzen 5 3600 as I may upgrade from the 2600. I've seen the horrors behind flash updating this particular board, some have resulted in a brick. Which is why I've been so reluctant to flash from it's factory bios. I've also read about this in some places. The bios ROM on it now works fine. I don't want the headache of using a eeprom programmer to fix a bricked board as it may not even fallback to the backup bios.