Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro review - Introduction

Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro motherboard
A more value Ryzen motherboard for Ryzen 2000/Zen+.

We review the Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro, optimized for Ryzen processors, and in specific the new Ryzen 2000 / Zen+. The new B450 series chipset based board offer some more appealing value, as budget wise these board sell at a sub 125,- USD/EUR price point, and Gigabyte certainly chucked this board full with features. So much so that you cannot really look at it as a budget offering anymore.

Yeah, Zen+ was launched in April, aka Ryzen 2000 or 12nm optimized Ryzen processors, the 'refresh' SKUs so to say. The new 12nm Zen+ processors will work fine with your X370 chipset based motherboard and vice versa, however, AMD launched the X470 chipset alongside these new Zen+ processors. The new chipset offers small improvements in combo with the new 12nm products. For example, to better facilitate XFR2 options. It has been a year already ever since AMD launched the first generation Ryzen processors. It had a bit of a rocky launch with the inter-core latency discussion a 1080p gaming performance as well as memory support. But the tide definitely turned for AMD as more and more people are considering to purchase an AMD processor-based PC, for their next purchase. The memory compatibility issues are mostly all gone, of course, we'll look at game performance in this article as well. But yes, things are looking good. The new 12nm processor generation can be clocked a notch higher. The upper range frequencies at 4.2~4.3 now are feasible, that also means that on the lower end of the spectrum, AMD is now capable to increase base-clock performance ion the more high-end parts. All these little tweaks bring the benefit of an overall faster processor series. Add to that improved memory latency and improved XFR2 ranges and you'll notice that the new ZEN+ generation now has become a really viable and more competitive product. So the ones that have not made a move towards AMD Ryzen just yet, now potentially could or will.  

What you're going to see on most motherboards is that they are mostly ATX form factor solutions that have been fitted with three PCIe x16 slots, but please do realize that's 16 lanes PCIe Gen3 for the first slot, the second gets four, the third even just one. The second and third slots are connected PCI Express 2.0, not 3.0. (chipset connection). The board mostly if not all come with a second M.2 slot, but here is a direct limitation again. The first M2 storage slot uses four PCIe lanes, the second is only powered by two lanes. Then again, these are budget offerings. It has six SATA ports for the classic configuration. 

Today's tested motherboard, the Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro, is obviously based on the B450 chipset and thus its feature set. This more value series boards include support for dual M.2-NVMe SSDs (incl heatsinks), USB 3.1. The primary PCIe slot is metal reinforced to withstand the weight of high-end cards. This board is NOT SLI or Crossfire compatible. The audio features a proper Realtek ALC 1220 codec. The motherboard is reasonable in its features but certainly will look nice on any DIY PC build. The dark styled PCB comes with that Aorus style as well as some subtle light RGB accents. Combine this motherboard with any Ryzen 2000 series four, six or eight-core processor and you'll be pleasantly surprised as to what it offers. Let’s start up the review, shall we?