Tuesday, May 22nd 2018
AMD B450 Mid-range Chipset Detailed
AMD is giving finishing touches to its second 400-series motherboard chipset, the B450. Slated for a 2H-2018 launch alongside the Ryzen 5 2500X and a few other entry-level 2nd generation "Zen" processors, the B450 succeeds the mid-range B350 chipset, comes with out of the box support for Ryzen 2000 "Pinnacle Ridge" processors, and has a couple of features up its sleeve. To begin with, it puts out the same numbers of USB, SATA, and PCIe links as the B350. You get two 10 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2 ports, just two 5 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 1 ports, just two SATA 6 Gbps ports, and just six downstream PCI-Express gen 2.0 lanes. The AM4 SoC augments this paltry connectivity with two more 5 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 1 ports, two more SATA 6 Gbps ports, and a 32 Gbps M.2 PCIe slot. Unlike mid-range chipsets from Intel, the AMD B450 and B350 retain CPU overclocking support.
Like the X470, the new B450 comes with a reduced idle power-draw of less than 2W, and hence can be cooled by extremely tiny heatsinks. The chipset has the same "enhanced" CPU VRM and memory routing specifications (additional PCB layers), introduced by the X470. To be more business/enterprise-friendly, the B450 lets system administrators disable specific USB ports of the motherboard from the UEFI setup program. Also, both X470 and B450 support NVMe RAID, which was exclusive to the X399 in the previous generation. You also get out of the box support for AMD StoreMI technology. Interestingly, the table detailing the B450 lists a feature exclusive to the X470 and B450, called "XFR 2.0 Enhanced." No AMD technical document we read tells us what XFR 2.0 Enhanced is, and how it's different from XFR 2.0 (separately listed in that table).
Sources:
El Chapuzas Informatico, VideoCardz
Like the X470, the new B450 comes with a reduced idle power-draw of less than 2W, and hence can be cooled by extremely tiny heatsinks. The chipset has the same "enhanced" CPU VRM and memory routing specifications (additional PCB layers), introduced by the X470. To be more business/enterprise-friendly, the B450 lets system administrators disable specific USB ports of the motherboard from the UEFI setup program. Also, both X470 and B450 support NVMe RAID, which was exclusive to the X399 in the previous generation. You also get out of the box support for AMD StoreMI technology. Interestingly, the table detailing the B450 lists a feature exclusive to the X470 and B450, called "XFR 2.0 Enhanced." No AMD technical document we read tells us what XFR 2.0 Enhanced is, and how it's different from XFR 2.0 (separately listed in that table).
5 Comments on AMD B450 Mid-range Chipset Detailed
Does the drive run at x4 and GPU at x16 on both?
AMD did not "detail" anything publicly/officially.
Yes, that should be the case. They're both attached to the CPU as well. The PCI-E config should be based on 24 lanes (16 to GPU, 4 to m.2 NVMe and 4 to chipset). According to the table B450 doesn't allow multi GPU and it limits the lanes available to the chipset and therefore less connectivity.
I suspect 470 boards will have better power delivery and cooling which means better OC. Ryzen isn't exactly a massive OC capable platform to begin with so most people are probably not missing out by going B450.