GIGABYTE B450M H or GIGABYTE B450M S2H or ASUS PRIME B450M-K II or GIGABYTE B450M S2H V2 ???

[fgr1234]

Which is best GIGABYTE B450M H or GIGABYTE B450M S2H or ASUS PRIME B450M-K II or GIGABYTE B450M S2H V2 ???

[Guest]

It won't matter. They are all the same low tier. Get the one that appeals to you most. 

[RONOTHAN##]

Personally I'd get the ASUS board due to bad experiences with Gigabyte, but they're all pretty similar and you'd be fine going with any of them.

[mariushm]

They're all equally shit.

 

Though some notes :

 

+ Gigabyte B450M S2H at least has some heatsinks on the VRM, so there's potential to not cook itself with more power hungry processors (like 8 core and higher ryzen)

 

+ Asus Prime B450M-K II has bios flashback feature, which would allow you to update bios without a cpu installed. The others don't.

-  but,  you lose one ps/2 ... asus has mixed ps/2 connector, you can only use one ... the others have separate ps/2 for keyboard and mouse if you ever plan to use them

-  and it has worse layout for pci-e x1 ... it has two slots right below the pci-e x16 so with a regular video card one slot would be blocked.

 

All but the Asus model have one pci-e x1 above the pci-e x16, so always usable, and the 2nd pci-e x1 is also usable (there's one slot empty between the x16 and the x1, so a regular 2 slot video card.

 

So if you plan to use something that's well supported by now, like for example Ryzen 1xxx or Ryzen 2xxx or Ryzen 3xxx processors, the Gigabyte B450M S2H v2 is probably the better deal out of them, simply due to extra heatsinks. The first/ original bios supports them out of the box. 

If you plan on Ryzen 4xxx or 5xxx processors, you need bioses released in March of this year so unless the board sat on shelves for 6 months, the board is probably gonna have that bios. For 5xxx with graphics, you need bios from 2 months ago, so most likely you'd need an older cpu to update bios to that bios version, before using the 5xxx cpu with graphics

But I doubt you plan on 4xxx or 5xxx if your budget limits you to these boards so it would be all good.

 

 

[Middcore]

The Asus for BIOS flashback and avoiding wonky Gigabyte BIOS.

[Levent]

I got a B450M S2H V2, I have nothing bad to say about it. It is able provide 90w to my 3100 and run my 2133mhz rams at 3433mhz no problem. Only thing I can provide here is that I saw someone report that regular B450M S2H might have 1 extra VRM for RAMs, but I honestly haven't felt that I was missing anything even though I am overclocking rams heavily.

[fgr1234]

They have 4+2 phases or 4+3?

[Levent]

8 hours ago, fgr1234 said:

They have 4+2 phases or 4+3?

FYI: Nobody will get a notification unless you quote them.

B450M S2H V2 from what I heard has 4+2 and B450M S2H has 4+3. That being said I have no way of confirming it.

[mariushm]

9 hours ago, fgr1234 said:

They have 4+2 phases or 4+3?

Doesn't really matter that much, the integrated graphics doesn't consume that much power to require 3 phases.

 

According to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wmsTYK9Z3-jUX5LGRoFnsZYZiW1pfiDZnKCjaXyzd1o/edit#gid=2112472504

the v2 uses only 2 phases for the SoC part... again, only really matters if you use processors with integrated graphics and then, matters very little. 

 

 

[fgr1234]

what difference between GIGABYTE B450M S2H V2 and GIGABYTE B450M S2H? Only phases 4+2 vs 4+3? They fixed some buggs or not in new model?

[mariushm]

You can see in the picture above and also in the picture below, the two boards compared

 

The first and obvious change, they changed the VRM controller from the Intersil one with 4+3 phases to the International Rectifier one with 4+2 phases. Could be simply because Intersil was bought by Renesas, could be Intersil/Renesas decided to stop making that chip in favor for other bigger ones which are also more expensive, could be Gigabyte simply decided to standardize across more models and use that IR controller on more boards.

 

Doesn't mean the first board's VRM chip is better, or worse, it's just a technical change.

 

In picture below, you have V2 on the left,  old version on the right.

You can see the vrm controller chips circled with orange, the difference in how much pcb area is required and how many other components are required by the controller.

 

The old board has 3 phases for the SoC (integrated graphics, sata/usb controllers inside cpu, and other crap). You can see them circled with light green, and the blues.

There's two chips on each phase, two mosfets for each phase on the old board ... one hi-side mosfet, one lo-side mosfet. They work together with the inductor (the black cubes/squares) to convert 12v to lower voltage. Think of them like cylinders in an engine ... they work together to produce energy and their output gets combined together.

 

So let's say each pair of mosfets can do 40A of current, then you could say the motherboard could do in total 3 x 40A = 120A maximum current available for the SoC.

 

In the new version, there's only 2 phases, but you can see that each phase has 4 mosfets, there's 2 hi-side mosfets and there's 2 lo-side mosfets.  So assuming same chips are used, instead of 3 phases each with 40A current, you now have 2 phases, but each capable of 2x40A = 80A of current because there's 2 hi-side and 2 lo-side chips, so in total the new version may do 160A of current, more than the old version.   So 2 phases is not always worse than 3 phases, that's what I'm trying to say.

 

But it's not about maximum current, because mosfets are very inefficient close to their maximum capabilities. They're more efficient at lower currents. So basically, if you can have 4 lo-side mosfets each doing 20A, instead of having 3 lo-side mosfets each doing 26A (on old version)  then those 4 lo-side mosfets may be more efficient and produce in total less heat and this heat is spread across 4 chips instead of across 3 chips.

 

Since there's more chips, each chip will have less current going through it, therefore will produce less heat, and the total heat is now spread over a larger area. You can also see the inductors are moved between the chips, so that the copper in the circuit board right under the chips can also behave like a heatsink. 

This all means the 2 phases should be able in theory to handle higher power consumption, or if the same cpu is used with both boards, overall that area of the board should be cooler.

 

I don't see any other significant improvements or changes. The HDMI connector is slightly different on the new model, has a bigger lip, which is good, makes better contact with IO shield and that's good.

Other than this, the new version also claims support for 3600 Mhz memory sticks, while the older version was validated only up to 3200 Mhz, but in reality both can probably handle 3600 Mhz just fine. Probably considering it's a budget board, they just didn't bother to validate a lot of 3600 mhz sticks back then when they made the original version.

I don't think they made hardware chances to increase maximum supported frequency.

 

[fgr1234]

Is gigabyte GA-A320M-H have the same vrm and phases like GIGABYTE B450M H?

[Middcore]

2 minutes ago, fgr1234 said:

Is gigabyte GA-A320M-H have the same vrm and phases like GIGABYTE B450M H?

 

Pretty obvious by looking at it that it does not. 

[fgr1234]

2 hours ago, Middcore said:

 

Pretty obvious by looking at it that it does not. 

What about GA-A320M-H rev. 2?

[mariushm]

A320 motherboards will almost always have weaker VRMs because they don't allow overclocking of CPUs so the maximum power CPUs could consume is easier to estimate. They'll put just good enough chips to handle a 6-8 core processor and not throttle it, if you're in a cool room and in a ventilated case... 

Large majority of them also won't have heatsinks on those VRMs which means the VRM will get hot faster, and stay hotter for longer periods of time.. a heatsink  slows down heating of vrm... that's a good thing because if you have a very power hungry cpu, the cpu can stay at boost frequencies or high frequencies for longer periods of time.  

 

I strongly recommend only going for a A320 based motherboard if you're making an office pc, where you won't game, or you'll do light gaming, and you won't plan to use more than a 6 core Ryzen cpu.