The ASRock B450 Gaming-ITX/ac was a very surprising board for me. With it being a rather inexpensive board, and also Mini-ITX, I really did not expect that much, but ASRock sure managed to pack in nearly every feature you'd expect out of a board with a better chipset as its base, and they managed to do so quite elegantly.

From the moment I got the box open and saw the board's layout to when I finally powered the system down when my testing was finished, I was left impressed by what this board has on offer, and quite defiantly, having made use of a more affordable chipset, yet with abilities that actually match the form factor quite intelligently. The only real negatives I could find after my short time with this board prior to the retail launch were more imposed by the board's form factor than by specific design choices, although I could really use more DIMM slots and more M.2 ports myself.

The more I think about my experience with this board, the more I have come to accept the fact that ASRock's Fatal1ty series of boards have matured to where they very neatly provide what every gamer says they want without any hassles or a lot of software bloat and other gimmicks we commonly see with other brands and their gaming products. I almost want to give ASRock the rank of "gaming king", but I think they need a slightly larger presence in the eSports-side of things before they can rightfully claim that crown. Until that changes, should you want to build a very capable Mini-ITX system using AMD's AM4 socket, you really need to look no further, whether it's for the really affordable RYZEN 3 2200G, like I have, or the highly-threaded RYZEN 7 2700X. This board's low cost and high capabilities make it the perfect choice for anyone who might only need a single PCIe slot.