ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING
In order to run the AMD Athlon 3000G, you will need an AMD B450 motherboard. The newest AMD B550 chipset does not support the AMD Athlon 3000G series of APUs (Athlon with Vega Graphics). This means the absolute best feature support will be found in the AMD B450 chipset motherboards for this CPU. We reached out to ASUS and asked for the best board to test this series of APUs, ASUS gladly send their ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING motherboard so that we could test these APUs.
The ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING is an AMD B450 chipset based motherboard and it is currently available for a great price at $129.99. This motherboard is packed full of features to make any APU stand out and feel like a higher-end desktop. This AM4 socket-based motherboard has support for AMD AM4 Socket for 3rd/2nd/1st AMD Ryzen/2nd and 1st Gen AMD Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics/Athlon with Radeon Vega Graphics Processors. You get support for up to DDR4-3600 with Ryzen 3rd gen and up to DDR-3200 with Ryzen 2nd gen and 1st gen, so there is plenty of room to open your Athlon 3000G up to faster RAM speeds. This motherboard also offers 2x M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe supported slots and NVMe RAID support. Being that this is B450 it supports PCIe 3.0 only. There are also 6x SATA 6Gb/s ports.
It has a pre-mounted I/O shield. On this shield is a DisplayPort and HDMI 2.0 connection. This is important because of the built-in graphics nature of the APU. The motherboard supports 2x USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports (2x Type A), and Intel I211-AT Gigabit LAN with ASUS LANGuard. The motherboard uses the SupremeFX S1220A CODEC for audio. High-quality Japanese components are used. The motherboard even supports multi-GPU CFX support.
The ASUS STRIX B450-F GAMING supports five onboard fan headers that support 4-pin PWM and DC fans. Usually, on motherboards with chipsets like these, you see fewer fan headers, but this motherboard doesn’t skimp. This motherboard also uses ASUS’s best components like Digi+ voltage regulator module and high-quality capacitors. The motherboard is also very capable in the overclocking department, which will help with what we are doing here today with the Athlon 3000G.
Overall, this motherboard will give our Athlon 3000G the best chance at performance and overclocking with tons of features for an entry-level computer.
Installation
Installation went smoothly. We did upgrade our motherboard to the latest BIOS version which is Version 3103 dated June 23rd, 2020, it contains the latest AGESA Combo PI V1 1.0.0.6. I also set DOCP for memory in the BIOS, however, it would not work at DDR4-3600MHz. We had to turn it down to DDR-3200MHz which worked perfectly. We actually found we could get it slightly higher, but DDR4-3200 is on the high-end of what is capable with this motherboard and chipset.
