The B 450 I Strix board is a formidable opponent when it comes to overclocking and performance, particularly with AMD's high-end Ryzen CPUs like the 3950 X. In this article, we'll delve into the details of how this board stacks up against its more expensive counterpart, the ROG Impact, and explore its strengths and weaknesses.

One key area where the B 450 I Strix shines is in terms of overclocking. With a base clock speed that's just 23 megahertz slower on average than the X 570 variant, this board is capable of handling even the most power-hungry CPUs with ease. In fact, we were able to overclock the 3950 X to incredible speeds without any issues, thanks in no small part to the robust vrm design and onboard cooling system.

However, one area where the B 450 I Strix falls short is in terms of PCI Express version. Unlike the X 570 Ice Tricks variant, which comes with a more modern Gen 4.0 interface, the B 450 board still uses the older Gen 3.0 standard. This may not be a significant issue for most users, but it's definitely worth noting.

In addition to its overclocking capabilities, the B 450 I Strix also offers some unique features that set it apart from other boards in its class. One notable example is the presence of an onboard power button and CMOS reset switch at the rear of the board, which can be very convenient for users who need to quickly reset or shutdown their system.

Another feature worth mentioning is the lack of a hard limit on the CPU cooler fan curve. Unlike some other ROG boards we've seen, which have strict limits on how much power can be drawn from the vrm, the B 450 I Strix does not have this restriction. This means that users who want to push their CPUs to extreme overclocking speeds will have more flexibility and control over their cooling setup.

Speaking of CPU coolers, we did take a look at the thermals on our test system with the X 570 Ice Tricks variant. While it's true that all ROG boards we've seen so far have had hard limits on the vrm sensor fan curve, the B 450 I Strix actually allowed us to push the CPU cooler to higher temperatures without any issues.

In terms of real-world performance, we did see some differences between the two boards. The X 570 Ice Tricks variant was able to deliver slightly faster system speeds due to its more modern Gen 4.0 interface and better vrm design. However, these differences were not dramatic, and in many cases, the B 450 I Strix was able to hold its own or even outperform its counterpart.

One area where the X 570 Ice Tricks variant is likely to be a more sensible choice is for users who are building systems with very limited airflow. The robust vrm design and onboard cooling system on this board make it well-suited for use in compact cases like the SFX DNA for SFX or Ghost S1, which can sometimes struggle to keep even the most powerful CPUs cool.

In contrast, the B 450 I Strix is more geared towards users who are building systems with good airflow and don't need the extra features of the X 570 Ice Tricks variant. For users who want the best of both worlds, however, we would recommend going for the more expensive ROG Impact board instead.

Ultimately, the choice between the B 450 I Strix and the ROG Impact will depend on your specific needs and budget. If you're building a powerful system with good airflow and don't need the extra features of the X 570 Ice Tricks variant, then the B 450 I Strix is definitely worth considering. However, if you want the absolute best performance and flexibility, then the ROG Impact may be the better choice.

In any case, we hope this article has provided some valuable insights into the capabilities and limitations of the B 450 I Strix board. Whether you're a seasoned overclocker or just looking for a reliable system for everyday use, there's no denying that this board is capable of delivering impressive performance with minimal fuss.

As always, we'd like to thank our readers for watching and hope that you found this article informative and helpful. If you have any questions or comments about the B 450 I Strix board or its performance, please feel free to let us know in the comments section below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enif you're building a fresh new risin ITX gaming or workstation system then you're probably tossing out between a be 450 or X 570 motherboard the good news is despite opting for ITX you've still got a few really decent options out there which won't be handicapping your powerful little system the question is though whether you do go for that x5 70 motherboard and to spend that extra money or perhaps save a bit of cash and go for a B 450 motherboard and perhaps that'll get the job done just fine to help us with that testing today we do have the 16 Core Rison 39 50 X which will help us test the kind of worst-case scenario in terms of power requirements and cooling so while AMD expanding their mainstream m4 socket to support up to 16 cores is a true blessing for the host users building a compact workstation you could potentially get a different experience depending on the board that you're using maybe the board you chose ends up running the CPU voltage higher than necessary maybe the vrm or chipset tends to be a bit toasty under load these are the things that we're going to be testing today and diving into in this video but before we dive into the testing I want to take a very broad look at your current options when it comes to be 450 and X 570 ITX boards and pick out some of the general better options so starting with B 450 and we've got four options now if you're not going to be overclocking or maybe you're just interested in a risin 5 build for gaming all of these builds have V RMS that will be fine under those workloads and power requirements and when we start discussing overclocking and heavy workloads like rendering and encoding that vrm becomes a pretty important set of hardware as that's what channels all of that power to the CPU so with that in mind the MSI gaming + AC has the strongest vrm here but the asou Strix isn't too far behind both run 6 true phases with integrated power stages for the vcore vrm however despite the MSI having a stronger vrm I do prefer the ROG Strix board overall you get an additional MDOT to slot so one on the front and one on the rear you get faster re USB ports a better audio codec and also an additional four pin pwm fan header it is around twenty five dollars more expensive at the time of filming but those additional features are worth it in my opinion moving on to an overview of your x5 70 options and it's interesting to take a look at the general spec bump here that you get over the B 450 eye boards the two most noteworthy upgrades are the much beefier vrm and the active onboard cooling but we also have a rear i/o which gets a decent overhaul and on all of these boards we also have Wi-Fi 6 connectivity if you have the speeds for it so the V RMS on all of these boards are capable of running a 16 core 3950 X but for argument's sake the ROG Strix and crosshair 8 impact to have the strongest vrm in terms of total output there the CPU power is split over the larger number of power stages and that means that the heat produced is dissipated over a larger area also the Strix and the crosshair 8 impact are also the only two boards with active vrm cooling whereas with the other boards you'll just want to make sure that you've got enough airflow over the motherboard do note that the crosshair impacted technically isn't an ITX board but instead a DTX board it does extend about an extra 30 millimetres vertically at the bottom so on paper the - a sous rog boards aren't the better options but pricing does need to be considered here seeing as these will no doubt beat them more expensive options so with that general overview you've got a pretty good idea of what some of the better be 450 and X 570 ITX motherboards are out there but the real question is whether you even bother with X 570 in the first place because it is so much more expensive than P 450 I mean we are talking about over a 100 dollar difference comparing this board and this board and with those price savings you could potentially upgrade your GPU but certainly upgrade your memory or storage and have a better performing system maybe overall probably the most vocal concern going with a be 450 boards instead of an X 517 board now is whether it's going to support your upgrade path down the road and the only real way to test that now is with the most powerful processor that we can which is the 16 core 3950 axe if this be 450 board can potentially support that processor during heavy workloads then you could save a decent chunk of money on your system so let's jump right into the testing I've tested all three of these boards in the end case m1 seeing as this is one of the fewer ITX cases that the crosshair 8 impact is compatible with I'm using a 240 ml NZXT kraken X 53 to call the risin 3950 ax and the radiator fans are pulling air from the radiator and into the case this means that in terms of vrm cooling in case airflow this is pretty much as good as you're going to get for a small form-factor case now the first difference that I came across between these boards was the memory kit now although the co 1430 200 megahertz memory kit was stable via just simply enabling XMP in the BIOS for the 2 X 570 boards I did have to raise the DRAM voltage from 1.3 5 volts to 1.4 5 volts to get it stable on the B 450 eye board nothing major still stable at a relatively safe voltage at the end of the day but it does look like these 2 X 517 boards will be better for memory overclocking so first I just wanted to see how these motherboards behaved while idling on the desktop and not completing any tasks at all so we've got the B 450 ice tricks in orange the X 570 ice tricks in teal and the X 570 crosshair 8 impact in purple there's not a whole lot to conclude here saying as true idle performance is a pretty hard thing to test but overall the be 450 eye board does look like it's slightly more sporadic it's obviously handling some background tasks or processing towards the start of the data logging but even after that the voltage does seem to not be as a level as the other 2 X 570 boards again this is a pretty hard thing to test for that it is worth showing anyway but what we really want to see is how these boards handle the rise and 3950 acts under an actual workload like blender so here we're rendering out a very high resolution scene for 30 minutes while both the CPU and the vrm heater overall the CPU temperature was fairly close between all three of the boards during the render the be 450 I board actually around the 39 50 X the coolest by a couple degrees but this will make more sense in just a minute now revealing the vrm thermals we get some interesting results firstly we see that the be 450 I strokes can run the 39 50x fine at least with the case and color that we're running here vrm thermals top out at 72 degrees C after 30 minutes and although that is getting fairly warm there's nothing to be alarmed about that is definitely fine for daily use having said that if you're going to be using a different case and intend on starving your motherboard for air flow you probably will run into some issues here the X 570 cross a8 impact runs 16 degrees cooler after 30 minutes and the X 570 I Strix runs cooler again topping out at just 50 degrees C I will note that whereas the be 450 Astrix and X 570 impact have clearly labeled vrm sensors in hardware info the X 570 I streaks doesn't however I'm pretty confident that VR and thermals are under the sensor temp 9 but feel free to correct me down below if I am wrong the reason that the X 570 I strict runs a cooler vrm under load when compared to the more expensive X 570 impact can be found by looking at the low of V core so with all boards set to auto they all pull a fairly similar amount of voltage but of course this does need the context of clock speeds each board here is running the latest respective BIOS version and is interesting to see the fairly different result in first clock if you're running a lot of sustained loads like rendering or compression the extra 100 megahertz or so on the impact board may make a difference of course you could just manually overclock to that speed and Beyond but more on that in just a second on the bright side the be 450 I Strix has the 39 50 X just 23 megahertz slower on average than the more expensive X 570 variant the CPU package power shows the 2 X 570 boards pulling a bit more on average right up against that 142 watt power target for the 39 50 X the be 450 i/o board still has a bit more room to run though and although it's not taking full advantage of that power ceiling again it's only a hair slower than the x5 70 i board when it comes to overall average clock speed but let's go ahead and overclock that 39 50x and see if that'd be 450 i board can still keep up well we take a look at the CPU thermals first I'll mention that all a seuss ROG boards that I've come across have a hard limit for the CPU coolers fan curve where if the CPU surpasses a certain temperature it'll spin the fans up to 100% this is extremely annoying and I can't believe this is still a thing so that's the reason why we see that wave pattern for CPU thermals around that 75 degree mark also I have left out the X 570 ice tricks here as I wasn't confident in the vrm sensor used at the time but for all useful purposes we're putting a 150 dollar B 450 i/o board against a $400 plus top-of-the-line ROG impact board with the same overclocked 3950 X I've got to say that B 450 I board is definitely holding up vrm thermals hover around the 80 degree C mark and although I'd probably recommend going with an x5 70 I board at this point if you aren't planning on overclocking the CPU this is just extra assurance that the P 450 I board can do it if needed another reason that you might want to go for an x5 70 board though is due to PCI Express 4.0 it does have a much higher bandwidth than a 3.0 that you'll find on the B 450 board and we do get a much higher read and write speed for our Gen 4 nvme SSD as a result whether that extra speed is beneficial to you completely depends on at your workflow for most systems though there probably isn't going to be a practical perceivable difference going into this testing I'll be honest I really wasn't sure if the B 450 asterix could handle the 39 50 X after all this board wasn't built with the 39 50 X in mind another time of its launch the most power hungry chip in AMD's lineup was the 8 core 2700 X so the bottom line is if you have enough airflow in your case the B 450 I Strix he's good to go even if you are using a 39 50 X and that pretty much goes without saying that if you are using a risin 536 hundred or 700x this board is pretty much perfect and really should be at the top of your list for a mini ITX build and as we've seen there is no real reason that you wouldn't run this with a 3900 X or 39 50x given that airflow is adequate but just to be clear that doesn't mean that upgrading to the X 570 ice tricks is pointless the more robust vrm paired with the onboard cooling does make it the safer choice if the case that you're throwing it in doesn't have sufficient airflow across the board for example in sandwich layout cases like the DNA for SFX or ghost s1 where you might be using a liquid cooler the x5 70 Asterix would definitely be the more sensible choice there and as for the crosshair impact although I am a bit of a fanboy for the ROG impact series is just not a sensible recommendation given that the Strix board has the same vrm and onboard cooling at a significantly lower cost for the $100 plus over the strokes you get features for L into overclocking and onboard power button eclis CMOS and flash back button at the rear and a couple other features for extreme overclocking the x5 70 I Strix is stacked enough as it is though and high-end builds with some sort of budget should get that instead over the much more expensive ROG impact so hopefully this was helpful to you guys planning out your powerful mini ITX Rises and builds and if you're interested in any of these motherboard recommendations you can find them linked down below in the description as always guys a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next oneif you're building a fresh new risin ITX gaming or workstation system then you're probably tossing out between a be 450 or X 570 motherboard the good news is despite opting for ITX you've still got a few really decent options out there which won't be handicapping your powerful little system the question is though whether you do go for that x5 70 motherboard and to spend that extra money or perhaps save a bit of cash and go for a B 450 motherboard and perhaps that'll get the job done just fine to help us with that testing today we do have the 16 Core Rison 39 50 X which will help us test the kind of worst-case scenario in terms of power requirements and cooling so while AMD expanding their mainstream m4 socket to support up to 16 cores is a true blessing for the host users building a compact workstation you could potentially get a different experience depending on the board that you're using maybe the board you chose ends up running the CPU voltage higher than necessary maybe the vrm or chipset tends to be a bit toasty under load these are the things that we're going to be testing today and diving into in this video but before we dive into the testing I want to take a very broad look at your current options when it comes to be 450 and X 570 ITX boards and pick out some of the general better options so starting with B 450 and we've got four options now if you're not going to be overclocking or maybe you're just interested in a risin 5 build for gaming all of these builds have V RMS that will be fine under those workloads and power requirements and when we start discussing overclocking and heavy workloads like rendering and encoding that vrm becomes a pretty important set of hardware as that's what channels all of that power to the CPU so with that in mind the MSI gaming + AC has the strongest vrm here but the asou Strix isn't too far behind both run 6 true phases with integrated power stages for the vcore vrm however despite the MSI having a stronger vrm I do prefer the ROG Strix board overall you get an additional MDOT to slot so one on the front and one on the rear you get faster re USB ports a better audio codec and also an additional four pin pwm fan header it is around twenty five dollars more expensive at the time of filming but those additional features are worth it in my opinion moving on to an overview of your x5 70 options and it's interesting to take a look at the general spec bump here that you get over the B 450 eye boards the two most noteworthy upgrades are the much beefier vrm and the active onboard cooling but we also have a rear i/o which gets a decent overhaul and on all of these boards we also have Wi-Fi 6 connectivity if you have the speeds for it so the V RMS on all of these boards are capable of running a 16 core 3950 X but for argument's sake the ROG Strix and crosshair 8 impact to have the strongest vrm in terms of total output there the CPU power is split over the larger number of power stages and that means that the heat produced is dissipated over a larger area also the Strix and the crosshair 8 impact are also the only two boards with active vrm cooling whereas with the other boards you'll just want to make sure that you've got enough airflow over the motherboard do note that the crosshair impacted technically isn't an ITX board but instead a DTX board it does extend about an extra 30 millimetres vertically at the bottom so on paper the - a sous rog boards aren't the better options but pricing does need to be considered here seeing as these will no doubt beat them more expensive options so with that general overview you've got a pretty good idea of what some of the better be 450 and X 570 ITX motherboards are out there but the real question is whether you even bother with X 570 in the first place because it is so much more expensive than P 450 I mean we are talking about over a 100 dollar difference comparing this board and this board and with those price savings you could potentially upgrade your GPU but certainly upgrade your memory or storage and have a better performing system maybe overall probably the most vocal concern going with a be 450 boards instead of an X 517 board now is whether it's going to support your upgrade path down the road and the only real way to test that now is with the most powerful processor that we can which is the 16 core 3950 axe if this be 450 board can potentially support that processor during heavy workloads then you could save a decent chunk of money on your system so let's jump right into the testing I've tested all three of these boards in the end case m1 seeing as this is one of the fewer ITX cases that the crosshair 8 impact is compatible with I'm using a 240 ml NZXT kraken X 53 to call the risin 3950 ax and the radiator fans are pulling air from the radiator and into the case this means that in terms of vrm cooling in case airflow this is pretty much as good as you're going to get for a small form-factor case now the first difference that I came across between these boards was the memory kit now although the co 1430 200 megahertz memory kit was stable via just simply enabling XMP in the BIOS for the 2 X 570 boards I did have to raise the DRAM voltage from 1.3 5 volts to 1.4 5 volts to get it stable on the B 450 eye board nothing major still stable at a relatively safe voltage at the end of the day but it does look like these 2 X 517 boards will be better for memory overclocking so first I just wanted to see how these motherboards behaved while idling on the desktop and not completing any tasks at all so we've got the B 450 ice tricks in orange the X 570 ice tricks in teal and the X 570 crosshair 8 impact in purple there's not a whole lot to conclude here saying as true idle performance is a pretty hard thing to test but overall the be 450 eye board does look like it's slightly more sporadic it's obviously handling some background tasks or processing towards the start of the data logging but even after that the voltage does seem to not be as a level as the other 2 X 570 boards again this is a pretty hard thing to test for that it is worth showing anyway but what we really want to see is how these boards handle the rise and 3950 acts under an actual workload like blender so here we're rendering out a very high resolution scene for 30 minutes while both the CPU and the vrm heater overall the CPU temperature was fairly close between all three of the boards during the render the be 450 I board actually around the 39 50 X the coolest by a couple degrees but this will make more sense in just a minute now revealing the vrm thermals we get some interesting results firstly we see that the be 450 I strokes can run the 39 50x fine at least with the case and color that we're running here vrm thermals top out at 72 degrees C after 30 minutes and although that is getting fairly warm there's nothing to be alarmed about that is definitely fine for daily use having said that if you're going to be using a different case and intend on starving your motherboard for air flow you probably will run into some issues here the X 570 cross a8 impact runs 16 degrees cooler after 30 minutes and the X 570 I Strix runs cooler again topping out at just 50 degrees C I will note that whereas the be 450 Astrix and X 570 impact have clearly labeled vrm sensors in hardware info the X 570 I streaks doesn't however I'm pretty confident that VR and thermals are under the sensor temp 9 but feel free to correct me down below if I am wrong the reason that the X 570 I strict runs a cooler vrm under load when compared to the more expensive X 570 impact can be found by looking at the low of V core so with all boards set to auto they all pull a fairly similar amount of voltage but of course this does need the context of clock speeds each board here is running the latest respective BIOS version and is interesting to see the fairly different result in first clock if you're running a lot of sustained loads like rendering or compression the extra 100 megahertz or so on the impact board may make a difference of course you could just manually overclock to that speed and Beyond but more on that in just a second on the bright side the be 450 I Strix has the 39 50 X just 23 megahertz slower on average than the more expensive X 570 variant the CPU package power shows the 2 X 570 boards pulling a bit more on average right up against that 142 watt power target for the 39 50 X the be 450 i/o board still has a bit more room to run though and although it's not taking full advantage of that power ceiling again it's only a hair slower than the x5 70 i board when it comes to overall average clock speed but let's go ahead and overclock that 39 50x and see if that'd be 450 i board can still keep up well we take a look at the CPU thermals first I'll mention that all a seuss ROG boards that I've come across have a hard limit for the CPU coolers fan curve where if the CPU surpasses a certain temperature it'll spin the fans up to 100% this is extremely annoying and I can't believe this is still a thing so that's the reason why we see that wave pattern for CPU thermals around that 75 degree mark also I have left out the X 570 ice tricks here as I wasn't confident in the vrm sensor used at the time but for all useful purposes we're putting a 150 dollar B 450 i/o board against a $400 plus top-of-the-line ROG impact board with the same overclocked 3950 X I've got to say that B 450 I board is definitely holding up vrm thermals hover around the 80 degree C mark and although I'd probably recommend going with an x5 70 I board at this point if you aren't planning on overclocking the CPU this is just extra assurance that the P 450 I board can do it if needed another reason that you might want to go for an x5 70 board though is due to PCI Express 4.0 it does have a much higher bandwidth than a 3.0 that you'll find on the B 450 board and we do get a much higher read and write speed for our Gen 4 nvme SSD as a result whether that extra speed is beneficial to you completely depends on at your workflow for most systems though there probably isn't going to be a practical perceivable difference going into this testing I'll be honest I really wasn't sure if the B 450 asterix could handle the 39 50 X after all this board wasn't built with the 39 50 X in mind another time of its launch the most power hungry chip in AMD's lineup was the 8 core 2700 X so the bottom line is if you have enough airflow in your case the B 450 I Strix he's good to go even if you are using a 39 50 X and that pretty much goes without saying that if you are using a risin 536 hundred or 700x this board is pretty much perfect and really should be at the top of your list for a mini ITX build and as we've seen there is no real reason that you wouldn't run this with a 3900 X or 39 50x given that airflow is adequate but just to be clear that doesn't mean that upgrading to the X 570 ice tricks is pointless the more robust vrm paired with the onboard cooling does make it the safer choice if the case that you're throwing it in doesn't have sufficient airflow across the board for example in sandwich layout cases like the DNA for SFX or ghost s1 where you might be using a liquid cooler the x5 70 Asterix would definitely be the more sensible choice there and as for the crosshair impact although I am a bit of a fanboy for the ROG impact series is just not a sensible recommendation given that the Strix board has the same vrm and onboard cooling at a significantly lower cost for the $100 plus over the strokes you get features for L into overclocking and onboard power button eclis CMOS and flash back button at the rear and a couple other features for extreme overclocking the x5 70 I Strix is stacked enough as it is though and high-end builds with some sort of budget should get that instead over the much more expensive ROG impact so hopefully this was helpful to you guys planning out your powerful mini ITX Rises and builds and if you're interested in any of these motherboard recommendations you can find them linked down below in the description as always guys a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one\n"