I was looking for a reasonably priced board as for a productivity/light gaming/light media creation build. I was biased toward Gigabyte from my last two builds, but their boards were expensive relative to features. After researching, I decided to try the MSI B450-A Pro Max, even though my only previous experience with MSI was a bad board a long (AMD K-6) time ago.
Six months after purchasing, I could not be happier. Installing the board in my case was a snap, and component installation was easy, too. Having multiple 4-pin fan connectors allows me to have a cool, quiet system. BIOS settings are clear and easy. Everything just worked, and with a bit of tweaking, it works great!
Yeah, the board is chocolate brown. My Noctua fans are ugly brown, too, and they work great...like this board. I could deduct a 1/2 star of the lack of printed manual in the box, but I have one after printing the manual downloaded from the MSI site.
The balance of price and features makes the MSI B450-A Pro Max the best value I could find.
My build:
Fractal Design Define R5
MSI B450-A Pro Max
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB 3000
nVidia GeForce 1650 OC
Samsung 970 EVO PLUS 250 GB m.2
Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB
WD Black 1 TB
| RAM | DDR4 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 3466 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Radeon |
