ASRock B650M PG Lightning

Compact motherboard from ASRock Phantom Gaming line, equipped with modern AMD AM5 processor socket. It is one of the most affordable options for building a compact PC with Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors. The board supports DDR5 reactive RAM and modern video cards with support for artificial scaling and ray tracing technologies, as well as a modern PCI-E 5.0 data exchange bus.

Like its Phantom Gaming siblings, the board features reinforced, armored graphics card slots and supports Crossfire mode, which allows two completely different graphics cards to work in tandem. Thanks to the integration of the PCI-E 4.0 interface, the board can install one or two high-speed M.2 SSD drives with a maximum read speed of up to 7500 MB/s, which will significantly speed up the loading of textures and game objects from the video card memory.

In addition, there are 4 ports for classic SSDs and HDDs on the SATA3 interface. The ASRock B650M PG Lightning is equipped with four DDR5 RAM slots, supporting up to 192 GB of RAM with a maximum frequency of 7200 MHz. The built-in Dragon RTL8125BG network controller provides high speed processing of cable connections with an incoming stream of 2.5 gigabits per second. Considering the compact dimensions of the board (note: micro-ATX format) and not the most efficient power subsystem (9 phases), the board is more suitable for those gamers who are aiming to build a compact and neat PC that can easily run gaming blockbusters like Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, Alan Wake 2 Baldur's Gate 3 in 1080p and 1440p.

Fans of manual overclocking should be pleased with the presence of XMP profiles with built-in settings for overclocking RAM, support for Precision Boost Overdrive and Blazing OC Tuner to optimize the interaction between the processor and the SSD drive. In case of lack of performance, the user can use the built-in tools to overclock and optimize the system. In particular, it should be noted the presence of XMP profiles for optimizing RAM settings, support for Precision Boost Overdrive technology for automatic processor overclocking, and the built-in Blazing OC Tuner tool for tuning drives.