the 2 pcie 1x slots never worked until the latest beta bios. beta bios brought new life to the board in 2024, 5800x3d support is awesome, and rebar support is a nice touch to have. personally would try to stay on a pcie 3 GPU cause no pcie 4 support, but if the pcie 4 card is a x16 card then you should most likely be fine and no experience any bottleneck. probably a good idea to stay away from the lower end amd cards like the 6500 xt and cards like the rtx 4060 on this board. other than that, nice to see this relic of a board getting support and still usable in 2024.

This motherboard should be 5 stars. It looks great, the bios is so easy to use, there’s 4 sata ports which is more than enough at this price point. I had to take a star off however because there really should be more fan headers. I ended up having to get 2 fan splitters which is kind of annoying. Other than that however it’s a really solid mothrboard, I’ll be hanging onto it for quite a while.

It's great for the price, the UEFI is decent, but it has 2 fan headers. Other than that I really can't complain about it. It also has some RGB for ambiance.

Have had zero issues w/ this mobo so far. My 3200mhz RAM works fine in it w/ XMP on. Set the Ryzen 5 1600 to 3.6 at 1.3 volts w/ no problems. I'll try OCing it later.

Guess you can't go wrong with this lil' mobo. Wifi card sits awkwardly close to my GPU, which I have to remove in order to reach the M.2 slot. BIOS works fine, but doesn't have as many OC options as my old Z77 Extreme4 did (basically just gives you bclock and some voltages in expert mode), which might disappoint more hardcore OCers...but those people would usually get a higher-end mobo anyway. Also had to 'OC' my RAM just to get it to 2400.

This is a tough one and I wanted to give it more stars because overall it's a great mobo. It's just missing some things whilst the BIOS is easy to use... it has a mind of it's own!

Firstly it has only two sys fan headers, which as it turns out is a common theme among Micro ATX B350 motherboards. I couldn't go to ATX due to my original case at the time and the case I now have was already on the wish list. But it bugs me because my Gigabyte B250M was able to get 3 headers and 2 more SATA ports in the same space. I am using 2 y-splitters to get over this.

Which brings me on to the 4 instead of 6 SATA ports. Again problem could be solved I suspect by going for a bigger format but as someone with a lot of media storage it'd be nice to have more. I see a PCI-e SATA card in my future.

Onto overclocking... So far no problems at all with things like VRM temps at 1.36v (ish..) and it was very easy to set in the BIOS. However for some inexplicable reason the BIOS actually changes the voltage you put in. So for example I was trying to go lower to 1.34 and it would change it up to 1.37.. Various things like this and I only noticed it when running CPU-Z.
MSI have said that this is "normal" and not to worry about it but, it's rather frustrating to not have complete control over the voltage to be able to maximise the OC of my chip.

Pleasantly surprised that the prebuilt came with a B350M motherboard, and it fits perfectly into my build.

Sometimes, less is more. This could be one of those times.

Even so, this is one of the few motherboards of its size with a heatsink for the VPMs that matter for OCing - and while I probably wouldn't go too mad trying to squeeze a Ryzen 7 on this board, it works just fine with my Ryzen 3 and I'm quietly confident Ryzen 5 owners wouldn't have too many complaints either.

I really want to give this 5 stars!! But, a recent BIOS update (v1.7) which introduced system instability over its previous state, and other supporting software that seems to be quite buggy means that, because it is all offered as part of a complete package, 1 star has to come off.

Don't let this dissuade you though. If you don't need ALL the bells and ALL the whistles, but are looking for a decent budget board that will deliver a lot of the features that seem to be usually reserved for its bigger brothers, you should definitely look at this.

I'm a first time builder and this board has only encouraged me to do more.

plenty for a simple cheap build. good enough quality it's budget but you aren't loosing functionality and it won't limit what you can do.