Amazon.com: Asus PRO Gaming Motherboard (TUF B450M~90MB10A0-M0EAY0) AMD AM4 DDR4 mATX : Electronics

first off, mine had already been opened by someone despite being sold as “new”. The seal was broken and it had the instruction manual for someone else’s ATX case in the box and the warranty card was missing.

I had waited SO LONG for this to arrive (two failed orders) that I decided to persevere with this one. these boards were flashed with a new bios after leaving the factory to make them compatible with Ryzen3000 series and I told myself that was why it appeared to have been tampered with… although not likely… :[

The issue started when the system would not reliably post and sometimes needed one or two hits of the reset button before it would post and boot up. not fun at all. especially with how much of a chore motherboard swaps and RMA processes are. I wanted to try everything possible to avoid returning this.

now the weird bit was that the board seemed to have the wrong bios installed. something I thought was impossible until I witnessed it. (verified by a friend as well) The one installed seemed to be for the ATX version. mine was the mATX.

EZflash said the bios was up to date despite the ASUS support website showing two newer ones. Easy flash refused to accept the bios files I down loaded from ASUS. saying it was the wrong type. I gave up but came back to it a few weeks later and found a new bios version had been released so I downloaded and tried again. (v2202)

to my amazement, delight and relief this one was accepted and the bios flash completed successfully!

The board now posts and boots reliably and everything is stable and fine. I’m happy now but wish it hadn’t been such a hassle. I have to give the ASUS support site a C- pages not loading and generally being unreliable. I swear their server is hosted on a dial-up connection.