Upgrading my PC with a cheap AliExpress motherboard

hello everyone and welcome to another video now a few months ago I bought this Asus Rog gaming PC it's a great looking machine and right up until last week I've been using the case to house my everyday components recently however a friend offered to buy this system from me providing I put the am4 motherboard back in here along with the Ryerson 3600x his intention is to upgrade to a 5000 processor at a later date but this is where we come across a problem see the latest BIOS version 303 for the ga15dh board here dates back to 2020 and doesn't seem to support 5000 series chips I don't know if I'm missing something maybe there's perhaps a workaround for this but what I do know is that my ryzen 5 5600 and 5700g would not work on this board as is at first I thought oh no maybe it's dead it's been in the draw for months but installing the trusty Athlon 3000g and booting up again revealed that all was well now I couldn't possibly let my friend buy this system knowing that his future upgrade plans wouldn't be possible so I called off the sale and ended up building him something brand new it looks like I'll be keeping my beloved Asus pre-built for a while longer yet but I decided I would give this machine a new lease of Life anyway albeit on a small budget with just a couple of hundred pounds to spend it seemed like the perfect opportunity to check out one of these this is The maxan Terminator b550m a low-cost am4 board from AliExpress it was cheaper than any new b550 board I could find here selling for 67 pounds at the time of this video on the Max and Global store I also found one on Amazon UK for 88 pounds and as far as I can tell the only difference aside from the higher price is the inclusion of a CMOS battery now Maxson are a lot more popular or well known own in the Asian market in their presence in the west is quite minimal though I am starting to see more and more of their products pop up here and there the last time I used a maxim product it was a graphics card and that was absolutely fine so I just had to give one of their motherboards a go nice to see a company still putting emphasis on box art as well good looks will only get you so far though at least that's what my mum tells me and it's what's on the inside that counts here then we have the b550m Terminator itself which will take a closer look at in just a moment the i o Shield which did come in packaging as well by the way I just filmed the unboxing part after already unboxing everything we also have a single Sata cable in here and a separate bag containing a standoff and screw for an m.2 Drive last but not least we've got the warranty documentation which states three years but I can only comment on this when or if I have to use it there's a QR link to the manual as well on this bit of paper but let's take a closer look at the board itself the first thing that stands out to me is what Maxon calls the alloy heat dissipation armor the vrm heatsink and the Southbridge heatsink both matching in an all black finish there are two ddr4 slots here with a 64 gig Max Capacity according to the website and speeds of to 3 800 megahertz the PCA expansion slots are from top to bottom pcie 4.0 x 16 3.0 X1 and 3.0 X4 there's also a pcie 4.0 X4 m.2 slot here as well and any double slot graphics card will obscure this from view portwise we have six USB PS2 ethernet audio HDMI and perhaps surprisingly VGA after a close look at the board it was time to get in my system along with today's CPU of choice the ryzen 5 5600 we've also got 32 gigs of 3200 megahertz ddr4 in here and the 4060 TI which I'm currently using as believe it or not it's the best card I have everything fits inside my case nicely though using a large ish not to a cooler like my one can make things appear quite cramped this won't be staying as I can't actually get the side panel on with it installed I'll likely revert to the stock cooler but for today's video I needed something a bit fear now I consider myself a fairly basic user so when it comes to a bios there are just a few things that I look out for first things first though I always check the date of the installed bios and then see if there are any updates looks like there are a couple of new revisions available so I'll probably flash it at some point soon I'll update you if I manage to break it I then set about configuring everything else that I usually tweak such as enabling XMP enabling resizable bar support and tweaking the CPU fan curve interestingly and by default the CPU fan was set to stop when the processor dropped below 40 degrees I don't know if that's a feature of all modern boards but I had to disable that I mean there's something slightly unnerving about watching your CPU heatsink fan just stop completely if you insist on absolute silence though under load then it's certainly a nice to have option I mentioned it before but enabling rebar was a bit of a must-have for me as a user of Intel Arc G use I fully expected it to be there I just could have sworn I saw a review mentioning that it wasn't but that was probably just user incompetence there are also some concerns with Windows 11 support but I saw an Amazon review that confirmed it will work fine with the latest OS again after playing around with a couple of options in the Bios here since starting the script for this review a few days ago I've also been running the ryzen 5600 in this board overclocked which I was able to do by adjusting the clock speed and voltage you can use ryzen Master as well which I've almost no experience with but doing things the old-fashioned way worked well enough for me everything has been stable with no issues so far I've also got some benchmarks for you as well just for the sake of seeing how the 5600 performs at stock versus overclocked as well as in eco mode which we can set within the b550m terminator's BIOS 2. the CPU will draw less power when under load but performance won't be hugely impact impacted in eco mode a 5600 overclocked or not will still hold a 4060 TI back in games though and that should definitely be a reiterated now so far so good I will be keeping this board one of them anyway as I mentioned before I got one from Amazon and one from AliExpress I might get a 5800x 3D and see how that does I sort of like the idea of buying the best am4 gaming CPU and just running it for as many years as I can seeing how it holds up over time with the latest games I'll also update you should anything happen to this board itself now if you go looking for one of these you might see a few that look slightly different I believe the heatsink used to have some sort of pattern on it the design has changed a little bit you might also find some balls listed under the soyo brand Brian at Tech yes City reviewed one of these and he said that Max Sun basically bought out soyo so essentially you know same board it also conducted some tests with a 5600 as well as a 5800 100x3d and there was some vrm temp data in there too things were absolutely fine in fact I'll leave a link to that video below now all in all value for money-wise I think this board is worth considering if you're on a really strict budget price is maybe subject to change of course or they may have changed already since I published this video but at the moment the b550m Terminator costs less than some really basic a520 boards too for just over 150 pounds including my CPU I've given my old Asus PC a new lease of life I've also seen some bald and CPU combos for a reasonable price directly from AliExpress as well so they might be worth checking out if you're looking to save more money thank you very much for watching that I hope you've enjoyed my sort of Mini review and uh update log I guess of uh my Asus Rog gaming PC Now with an AliExpress Max and motherboard I'll keep you updated as to whether Anything Goes wrong I don't think it will I think you know this is gonna hold out for quite some time and I'll certainly be keeping it for as long as I can let me know your thoughts below if you enjoyed this one leave a like leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and hopefully I'll see all of you in the next one

Channel: RandomGaminginHD

Views: 116,371

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Id: x3KGQDX1bpw

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023