Biostar B850MT-E PRO Motherboard Review – Entry-Level Features For AM5 Builders

Conclusion - A Baseline B850 Motherboard

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Since the arrival of B850 motherboards, AM5 builders have been getting good options for their new Ryzen 9000/7000 CPUs. While B650 motherboards have been decent, B850 options do an upgrade & that's compelling enough to reconsider your choice if you're coming from an older AM4 board. Today, we tested one of Biostar's B850 offerings.

In terms of specs, the 55A VRM, which features a 12-phase design and DDR5-8000 MT/s support, is decent enough for the vast majority of builders, but when looking at actual performance, we start seeing some bottlenecks on the B850MT-E PRO. The motherboard performs slightly lower than the other B850 options that we tested, which could be due to the VRMs hitting higher temperatures & since the power delivery is a single 8-pin connector, we can expect even major downsides if you're going to use a Ryzen 9-tier chip. Better stick with the Ryzen 5 or the Ryzen 7 series on this board.

Expansion slots are also decent with a single PCIe 5.0 x16 and a PCIe 4.0 x4 for further AICs.  The motherboard gets triple M.2 slots, of which one is fully cooled. There's a single 2.5GbE LAN port & no wireless networking is offered out of the box, though there is an antenna in the accessory for users who might want to add in a WIFI expansion card. Audio sticks with the older ALC892 codec. The following are the USB options you get, 15 in total:

•  2 x USB 3.2 (Gen2) Type-C ports (1 on rear I/O and 1 via internal header)
• 1 x USB 3.2 (Gen2) port (1 on rear I/O)
• 6 x USB 3.2 (Gen1) ports (4 on rear I/O and 2 via internal header)
• 6 x USB 2.0 ports (2 on rear I/O and 4 via internal header)

MSI MAG B850M Mortar WIFI Pros & Cons

• + Sub $150 US Pricing
• + Triple M.2 slots
• + Up To 8000 MT/s memory support
• + mATX design
• - No Pre-Installed IO Plate
• - Only 2 SATA III Ports
• - No WIFI Option
• - BIOS & CPU performance can be lackluster

In terms of pricing, the motherboard should retail for below $150 US. It is currently listed at 1299 Hong Kong dollars, which, if we exclude the regional tax, ends up below the price we mentioned above. So in that case, the Biostar B850MT-E PRO is a suitable mATX motherboard for those who want to go with AMD's latest Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 5 CPUs.

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