B450M PRO-VDH MAX

My teenage sons first pc build needed to be simple, reliable & powerful enough to handle his (xbox series x comparable) gaming and digital art.This MSI am4 board paired nicely with a Ryzen 5 cpu, an MSI Radeon 8gb gpu & an MSI 600W bronze psu. Yes it's basically an MSI pc... That though is advanta as everything fits together perfectly.Note it only has 2 ram slots but the 8gb x 2 Kingston Fury Beast my son installed are plenty to start with.The board is simple and square with mounting points in all the right places.It has an m.2 ssd port which my son used with a 256gb ssd & paired it with a 1tb 2.5 sata.It is fast and smooth for most games. Yes there are better, more expen ones of course, but for a total cost of around €500 all in it's a good starter build that he is very happy with!Remember to buy an am4 cpu cooler!

Decent budget motherboard.

As a first time builder this motherboard offered a great entry point, well labelled ports, good layout, pre flashed to support newer Ryzen CPUs, 4 ram slots and even an m.2 slot for an nvme drive. MSI's ezdebug led indicator is a welcome addition in troubleshooting any issues that may pop up while building, great for anxious builders.I built this pc with Gaming, video editing and 3D modeling in mind and so far (about 4 months of usage) it has handled everything perfectly fine. There has been no issues, despite me accidentally jabbing the board itself when my screwdriver slipped trying to mount my CPU cooler.It should be noted however that there are only 2 case fan headers and so for builds requiring multiple case fans you will need to daisy chain them or use a fan hub/splitter. I personally used a sata powered fan hub controlled by pwm.Another thing to note for those seeking RGB is that while this board has an RGB header, it is non addressable. This board supports 12v 4 pin rgbs which limits your personalisation ability as there are not many lights that support this form.And finally, and this is a personal nitpick, the board itself is brown and not black as the pictures would make it seem. This really is no big deal as my case's glass side panel is slightly tinted and I have no RGB in my system (yet) and so it looks black. With some RGB lights it will hide the brown-ness too with some colours.A slight annoyance I find is that sometimes the motherboard would make a loud click when turning on or off which doesn't seem to have any root cause, there are no negative side effects of this and is a mild annoyance at most.While it would be nice if the RGB header was aRGB, had a few more fan headers and an additional m.2 slot would be nice, this motherboard has already offered more than most users would ever need and you'll be hard pressed to find such a capable and fleshed out board for the price.

CaseiONZ KZ-32V PC Gaming/Office Case - Mini Tower Micro ATXNice cheap Case well made,No cable management as such but easy to tuck any cables to the right.2 x ssd/hdd mounting (from below)MotherboardMSI A520M-A PRO Motherboard mATX - Supports AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen Processors, AM4, DDR4 Cheapest motherboard but works really well for my needs. SSD and m.2MemoryCorsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) 3600MHz CL18 AMD Ryzen Computer MemoryProcessorAMD Ryzen 5 5500GT Retail Wraith Stealth - (AM4/6 Core/3.6GHz/19MB/65W/Radeon)Cheap Killer ProcessorAdditional Hardware neededI had an old PSU but Corsair CV550, CV Series, 80 PLUS Bronze Certified, 550 Watt Non-Modular Power Supply Would work wellA SSD such as Crucial BX500 SATA SSD 480GB, 2.5" Internal SSD, Up to 540MB/s, Solid State Drive - CT480BX500SSD1M.2 This one works well Fanxiang M.2 SSD - 512GB SSD PCIe Gen3x4 2280, Up To 3500MB/s, NVMe SSD with Graphene Cooling Sticker, 3D NAND TLC,

Bought as part of my budget friendly PC build. Was my first time building my own computer. Found it incredibly simple with the motherboard clearly labelled as it is. Has multiple USB ports, all of which work. Looks good in my case. Can’t complain at all about the quality as my PC is up and running without a fault. Have run system checks and all components are running smoothly and staying cool. Would recommend to anyone trying build a custom PC on a budget

This is a decent little mobo, and will get you on the AM5 platform at a fraction of the cost of its bigger brothers, of course at this price point there are some compromises, only one full size PCIe port, only 2 ram slots, no onboard Wi-Fi (despite the amazon listing saying otherwise) there is also the bare minimum of fan headers, and no usb type c support, so you are probably thinking why 5stars with all these shortcomings? The simple answer is value for money, this motherboard is literally half the price of its cheapest full size equivalent, and you can get round many of these issues, as it’s AM5 you will be installing 32gb of ram anyway which will be plenty for the majority of users, USB wifi adapters as cheap as chips, and give pretty good speeds, a lot of modern cases have fan headers built in, so you can get along with this cut down spec if you plan carefully. If this sounds like too much of a sacrifice then you will probably be better of going for a more fully featured motherboard, but for the budget conscious gamer you can absolutely get away with this board.