bought for my first set up

This was a great purchase for my home-built AMD system and has been working like a champ. I really do not use it for gaming but has been sweet so far. Bios and software are very good, I would however recommend that you upgrade the bios first. I have had no issues as of yet and has been functioning quite well. If you are able to get this board and starting small, I would recommend for a low budget system.

I purchased the B450 Gaming Plus ATX motherboard for my recent budget build. The motherboard came is an attractive and secure box with all the hardware required for installation. Note that I purchased the ATX version so I did not have any issues with CPU cooler installation like others have stated with the mAtx boards. As you can see in the pictures, I have a fairly large cooler attached to the board without issue or interference from neighboring components (Ignore the cable routing, was not done routing when this picture was taken).

This board states it is compatible with Ryzen 3 series CPU's out of the box, I can verify this as my Ryzen 5 3600 booted up without issue and no driver updates were needed. The locations for the ports on the board are fairly well thought out, the only thing I would like to see is more fan headers but luckily my cooling fans also had a plug to directly wire to the power supply. Downside to this is you lose fan control but that is not an issue for me as my fans are static rpm.

Cons:

The bios boot time for this board is extremely slow. I would guess about 10-15 seconds for the board to post and boot the computer. While not a deal breaker it is definitely an annoyance. Good news is that MSI has addressed this and released an updated firmware that resolves this issue.

I would recommend this motherboard for budget builds or PC builders that do not care for all the flashy RGB and RGB controller components. This has been installed for over three months of daily use and I have not had one issue with this motherboard.

You will notice in the pictures there is an RTX 2060 GPU, unfortunately two weeks after purchase this card was freezing and failing. I made the switch to a RX 5700 and do not regret that decision one bit. The RX 5700 is much more stable, costs less and benchmarks up there with the RTX 2070.

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List of parts I ordered for my budget build

Thermaltake SMART 600W ATX 12V Power Supply
https://amzn.to/36jPrOC

XFX Rx 5700 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card
https://amzn.to/30LxiYC

Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 3200 MHz DDR4 DRAM
https://amzn.to/2Ge3YAL

WD Blue 1TB PC Hard Drive - 7200 RPM
https://amzn.to/30Y4BYR

ADATA SU760 512GB 3D NAND 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD
https://amzn.to/2NSIb5O

uphere 3-Pack Long Life Computer Case Fan 120mm
https://amzn.to/2NVwafT

Cougar MX330 Mid Tower Case with Full Acrylic Transparent Window
https://amzn.to/38vr81B

B450 Gaming Plus Max Motherboard
https://amzn.to/2sSyblR

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core CPU
https://amzn.to/30PlKnu

upHere CCF150RD High Performance CPU Air Cooler
https://amzn.to/2Gf5Mta

When I first ordered this board it was by mistake, I thought I selected the B450 Tomahawk Max. When I noticed I checked reviews and it seemed like i would still be ok. so the day comes and it finally gets here (thanks covid19) and i put my system together. I install windows and after it does its reboots I shut it down and jump in to the BIOS. I enable XMP (3600mhz CL16) and save settings. All giddy I wait for the computer to boot, click on the start button then BOOM! restart. I scratch my head wondering what happened. After toying around with things I ran it at stock, got it to boot and ran updates. Tried it again and same thing. After several attempts I gave up and orderd a 16gb Gskill Tridentz Neo 3600 kit. Eagerly waited for it to arrive, Installed it then enabled XMP. This time it would wait until I loaded a program and would crash. I manually tweaked timings to the same result. Tweaked the voltages.... Same result..... I'm fed up about to RMA the board when my brain started working........ I need to update the BIOS, so I download the freshest bios insert my usb flash drive and extract the file to it. I preceded to read over the directions several times to make sure I knew I wasn't missing anything (not my first BIOS update but every Bios is a little different)... Shut down the system and insert the flash drive, dower it on and enter the bios. I go to Mflash utility and it reboots to flash the Bios.. It loads and tells me to insert the USB. I tried every USB slot with no luck so I said screw it and exited and booted to windows. Staring at the screen the little voice in my head said to see how the USB is formatted. So i did and it was formatted ExtFAT, so I reformatted it NTFS put the file back on the drive and rebooted. Got into the Bios clicked on Mflash it loaded the utility and woohooo it was there. I flashed the Bios, and rebooted. Once windows loaded I ran 3d mark to make sure it wasn't still randomly crashing. Rebooted and went to Bios enabled 2nd XMP profile (new option) and saved and exited. Once windows loaded i ran 3d mark, and my far cry 5 bench mark and did not crash. I ran memtest all night with no errors so I was happy. So to any one looking to get this board I would say definitely worth the buy, but if you have any memory problems try updating the bios.

Want windows to boot in a few seconds? This is the answer. Reliable and runs cool. Various sizing for your needs. This is a must have for modern computers.