GoKawiilIf you’re in the market for an inexpensive AM5-based board designed for Creators, the Asus B850-Creator is decent, but it lacks 40 Gbps ports or enough USB ports overall for most users.
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Asus’ B850-Creator Wifi Neo motherboard is designed to serve the creator community (think 3D modeling and rendering, animation, and other media production). This community tends to use a lot of bandwidth, particularly for storage when you’re dealing with large files, either via physical connections to external drives (think USB-C) or via a NAS over Ethernet. With that, Creator boards tend to focus on faster networking, storage, and USB ports to speed up workflows.
The B850-Creator Neo is a ProArt-class board for creators that tries to serve that niche, offering dual 5 GbE ports and two PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 sockets, neither of which is often found on a $299.99 motherboard. However, it doesn’t have any USB4/40 Gbps ports for connecting external storage (unlike the more expensive X870E-Creator Wifi), so any work that requires speed from your storage will have to come from the internal connections.
Outside of that, the X850-Creator Wifi Neo has enough ports and sockets to keep most budget users happy. On top of the 160 MHz Wi-Fi 7 and dual 5 GbE ports, you get eight total USB ports, though only six Type-A ports will leave some wanting. You also get three M.2 sockets (two PCIe 5.0) and a solid last-gen flagship-class audio codec. If you need more USB ports, you can use one of the two extra PCIe expansion slots for more, and even faster ports. Aside from the hardware specifications, the ProArt uses a clean, professional design with a black PCB and black heatsinks, along with metallic gold accents that spell out the ProArt branding on the VRM heatsinks.
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Performance testing went as expected and was quite similar to most other boards we tested. Overall, it performed well across most of our benchmark suite. It was competent at gaming and also above average at most tests, including rendering (as we’ll see in detail later), so there's nothing to worry about in terms of performance, no matter how you want to use this motherboard.
Below, we’ll examine the B850-Creator Neo’s performance and other features, although as you have probably guessed from the score above, it won't make it to our list of the best motherboards . But before we share test results and discuss details, here are the specifications from Asus’ website:
Specifications of the Creator Wifi Neo
Swipe to scroll horizontally Socket AM5 (LGA 1718) Chipset B850 Form Factor ATX Voltage Regulator 17 Phase (14x 80A DrMOS MOSFETs for Vcore) Video Ports (1) DisplayPort
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