Gigabyte Turns Back Clock With Upgraded B450 AM4 Boards For Cheap DDR4
No, you read the headline correctly: that's the B450 chipset, which originally came out in 2018 ahead of the Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 processors. It is perhaps a sign of the times, but here in the post-Zen 6 era (AMD launched Venice last month, remember?), Gigabyte has indeed launched two new models of motherboard sporting PGA AM4 sockets and the venerable B450 chipset.
I say two models, but it's really just one model with and without Wi-Fi. The GIGABYTE B450M-D3HP and its -WIFI6E sibling are Micro-ATX Socket AM4 motherboards with some pretty bare-bones specifications: a 4+2 phase VRM, DDR4 slots supporting speeds up to 2667 MT/s, PCIe 3.0 x4 for one of the M.2 slots (the other is PCIe 2.0 x2), and Gigabit LAN instead of 2.5-Gigabit. The CPU support List includes everything up to the Ryzen 9 5950X, which we'd be nervous about installing in a board with a 4+2 VRM, but it should work... probably.
It's not all bad, though; you do get Q-Flash Plus support in case AMD decides to release even more Socket AM4 processors in the future. You also get three display connections, which is a fascinating choice on Socket AM4 as only the "G" series processors have integrated graphics at all. There's a USB Type-C port, although it takes the form of an internal header, so you'll have to hook that up to use it. And, most likely, these boards will be remarkably affordable, though that remains to be seen.
Perhaps most critically, the boards come with three addressable RGB LED strip headers as well as a fourth, non-addressable RGB LED header. There are also four SATA-III ports and incredibly, a regular old RS-232 serial port header, which could potentially make these things interesting to the industrial crowd. Jokes aside, in the current market, we're thrilled to see any new hardware at all, even if they are budget-oriented motherboards for three-generations-old CPUs.
Sadly, while DDR4 memory is definitely cheaper than DDR5, it's also inflated in price, and you'd likely be spending more money on the memory than on these motherboards. We weren't able to find the new Gigabyte boards at e-tail yet, but they'll likely pop up soon. Since it's Friday, why don't you drop us a line in the comments and let us know what you think about these platters? Would you build a Socket AM4 system in 2026? Explain your reasoning in the comments below.
