Russia has started to manufacture its own B450 motherboards in partnership with GS Group and Philax. GS Group Holding and Philax have started manufacturing the first domestically-produced B450 motherboard for the Russian market specifically. Philax plans to release at least 40,000 motherboards to the Russian market.
The reason Russia starting to manufacturer its own motherboards is that the country wants to lessen its reliance on securing products internationally, so making them in-house is the first step with the introduction of the new B450-based motherboards and 50,000 monitors on the way.
Philax’s B450 motherboard design is very similar to ASRock’s B450M Pro4. Philax and ASRock probably reached an agreement for the latter to use the design, probably under a licensing agreement of some sort.
Philax used the ASRock B450M Pro4 because you can add a TPM module, a requirement for use by the government. TPM or Trusted Platform Module is a specialized chip on the motherboard that stores RSA encryption keys used by the system for hardware-based authentication.
The Philax B450 motherboard may have an older chipset but it is still compatible with a wide range of Ryzen processors and APUs, including the latest Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) and Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) lineups. Adhering to the micro-ATX form factor, the motherboard comes with four DDR4 memory slots. It supports DDR4-3200 and above memory modules. Below is a list of specifications of the Philax B450 motherboard.
- Supports AMD AM4 Ryzen™ 2000, 3000 and 5000 Series Desktop Processors
- Supports DDR4 3200/2933/2667/2400/2133 ECC and non-ECC memory up to 128GB
- support for up to three monitors
- 2x PCI Express 3.0 x16
- 1x PCI Express 2.0 x1
- 4x SATA3 6.0 Gb / s, supports RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions
- 2x USB 2.0 (ESD protection)
- 4x USB 3.1 Gen1 (ESD Protection)
Ryzen APUs will be able to take advantage of the motherboard’s D-Sub, DVI-D, or HDMI port. The new motherboards are expected to start shipping to government clients in Russia by May 2021, with select customers pre-ordering already. The new motherboards are also ready to house the Elbrus and Baikal CPUs which are domestically produced in Russia.
