B450m Mortar Max is a heavy artillery piece designed for long-range firepower.
B450m Mortar Max is a heavy artillery piece designed for long-range firepower.
I have an A320M with a Ryzen 5 3600 right now. I'm evaluating two motherboard choices for an upgrade: Steel Legend (m-atx) and Mortar Max. While the Steel Legend gets more attention online, the Mortar Max seems to be getting more praise, especially as the top B450 board. What are your thoughts?
It isn't perfect, yet it performs reasonably well. The outcome hinges on how you use the hardware and whether you anticipate adding more upgrades later. If you're not interested in overclocking or planning a future upgrade to a 12-16 core chip, the Steel Legend should suffice. Generally, the MSI board offers superior VRM cooling for CPUs that draw a lot of power, making it handle multi-core processors more efficiently. The Steel Legend still functions with high-core chips but may run hotter; a small fan can help manage the temperature. For a Ryzen 3600, this isn't an issue since the chip uses minimal power. The MSI board also supports higher DDR4 speeds up to 4133... although you won’t need speeds beyond 3600 MHz, as it’s largely irrelevant. Another benefit of the MSI board is its bios flashback capability, enabling BIOS updates without a CPU installed. Overall, both boards share similar specifications—identical video connectors, audio chips, PCIe slots, and more.