Question ASRock AB350 Pro4 AM4 (How good or bad is this board?)

[13Gigatons]

What's the word on this board at this point in time?

Mostly looking for good stable board and this one is selling pretty cheap now.

Also what RAM do you recommend for it?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Horribly outdated, doesn't work well with anything but Ryzen 1st-gen CPUs. Ryzen APUs aren't stable on them, no matter how many UEFI revisions ASRock seems to put out.

I have two of them (left, had three), with R5 1600 CPUs in them, they're OK. I thought that I had them successfully overclocked (one is under AIO 120mm water, temps are fine), but I was getting BSODs, so I'm no longer overclocked on these rigs.

You're better off getting a decent X470 board for $100-160.

 

[alexruiz]

My experience with that board has been very positive.
The power delivery is fine, and the board is very stable. Memory compatibility is very good.
Make sure you update the UEFI to 5.40 (AGESA PinaclePi 1.0.0.6)

Have built a few of them running with Ryzen 5 2600 and DDR4-3000. Team T-Force RAM works without an issue in this board.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My experiences are... different.

I re-built this rig, with the same AB350M Pro4 board, with a 2200G APU, and 2x8GB Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 RAM. Newest 5.50 BIOS, AGESA PinnaclePI-1.0.0.6.

First of all, the RAM won't run at 3000, nor at 2933. I had to clock it down to 2666 to POST without beeping.

Second, while it works in Windows 10, I've installed the newest GPU drivers from AMD, the 19.1.1 package, for Windows 10 64-bit.

I can now run NiceHash on the APU. That's a good thing.

The bad thing is, it won't complete a benchmark run of all of the algorithms. The entire machine reboots. (*)

I have a Rosewill Valens 600W 80Plus Gold PSU, which to my knowledge is find, it was running with a dGPU previously.

So, these rigs are NOT fully stable. Feels like AMD rigs are a house of cards. Or maybe just this mobo. It still doesn't want to restart all of the time correctly, sometimes, just a black screen, though I can C-A-D and then restart sometimes.

(*) My best guess, is the poor VRM sections on this board. It's a 3+2 board, 3 phases for main voltage plane, with doublers (fake 6 phase) (*2), along with 2 phase for the Vsoc voltage plane, which is used for powering the APU's graphics portion. Under heavy loads with this board, it's simply just not good enough.

(*2) See BuildZoid's teardown of this board.

 

[13Gigatons]

My experiences are... different.

I re-built this rig, with the same AB350M Pro4 board, with a 2200G APU, and 2x8GB Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 RAM. Newest 5.50 BIOS, AGESA PinnaclePI-1.0.0.6.

First of all, the RAM won't run at 3000, nor at 2933. I had to clock it down to 2666 to POST without beeping.

Second, while it works in Windows 10, I've installed the newest GPU drivers from AMD, the 19.1.1 package, for Windows 10 64-bit.

I can now run NiceHash on the APU. That's a good thing.

The bad thing is, it won't complete a benchmark run of all of the algorithms. The entire machine reboots. (*)

I have a Rosewill Valens 600W 80Plus Gold PSU, which to my knowledge is find, it was running with a dGPU previously.

So, these rigs are NOT fully stable. Feels like AMD rigs are a house of cards. Or maybe just this mobo. It still doesn't want to restart all of the time correctly, sometimes, just a black screen, though I can C-A-D and then restart sometimes.

(*) My best guess, is the poor VRM sections on this board. It's a 3+2 board, 3 phases for main voltage plane, with doublers (fake 6 phase) (*2), along with 2 phase for the Vsoc voltage plane, which is used for powering the APU's graphics portion. Under heavy loads with this board, it's simply just not good enough.

(*2) See BuildZoid's teardown of this board.

I have a feeling that your PSU is causing the problem.....have you tried a different brand/model?

I should note I didn't plan on using the APU....I would get it with a 1700x.