AM4 Budget Motherboard

SYTography · October 17, 2017

Greetings fellow LTT members. I had a question regarding AM4 motherboards. Its' been a minute since I followed tech tbh, and would like some advice and suggestions. I'm planning on either purchasing a Ryzen 3 1200 or R5 1500. Most likely gonna be 1200 cause i'm broke af. But anyways, could you guys recommend me a good motherboard on a budget which allows me to overclock on the stock cooler since a lot of people said the stock cooler is sufficient enough. My overall budget for the build is 550 if that helps.

Cyracus · October 17, 2017

mariushm · October 17, 2017

The stock cooler on Ryzen 1200 and 1300x is really lightweight,small, like those tiny coolers Intel packs with some Celeron processors.

Even so, the cooler is rated for 65w TDP while at default frequencies the cpu will use 25-29 wats. If you overclock heavily, the cpu is unlikely to go over 55-60 watts.

So basically the stock coler will hndle what you throw a it but will be somewhat noisy.

The Ryzen 1400 has the better cooler.

As for MB, with a Ryzen 1200, ANY mb with a B350 chipset would be fine. The differences between boards are usually in the quality of the vrm (the dc-dc converter which feeds power to the cpu.

Some people may pop up here saying don't buy msi boards because the vrm sucks , but that would only matter if you'd plan to buy an 8 core cpu and oc it to the max

For something like that you want a board with a vrm that can provife up to 140w to cpu without overheating.

With a ryzen 1200, a vrm only needs to provide 30w or 50-60w when overclocked, which ANY board can do.

If you think you may upgrade to a 6 or 8 core in the future,you should pick a board that has heatsinks around the cpu socket.

Boards with a320 chipset won't allow overclocking so don't buy them, and boards with x370 chipset are expensive and only matter if you plan on having SLI