Recap: Russia has started to develop its own essential electronics to bolster security and reduce its dependency on international trade. In addition to their existing custom processors, they’ve now begun producing B450 motherboards to take advantage of AMD’s stellar Ryzen CPUs.
Last week, Russia’s GS Group and Philax announced their partnership to produce “at least” 40,000 motherboards and 50,000 monitors. While the latter are still under development, the motherboards are almost ready to go; they’ve passed all the tests, even gotten certified for government use, and are now available to pre-order for select customers in Russia.
The motherboard is based on the AMD B450 chipset and appears to use the same design as the Micro-ATX Asrock B450M Pro4 (as spotted by Tom’s Hardware). It is distinct though; because its target demographic is government offices and businesses, it doesn’t have the same flashy looks or quite the same feature set. Despite appearing to have the same m.2 slots as the Pro4, the miniature drives aren’t listed as supported hardware, for example.
However, the board “fully meets the basic needs of an ordinary user,” according to the press release. Like most AMD B450 boards, it supports Ryzen 2000, 3000, and 5000 series processors, up to four 3200 MHz memory sticks, it has two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, and so on. Possibly as a requirement of government certification, it has support for a TPM (trusted platform module) for additional security.
In the next 18 months, GS Group will produce a wider variety of desktop motherboards and monitors in partnership with Philax, while exploring potential partnerships with other companies to expand their electronics portfolio. Motherboards for the Russian Elbrus and Baikal processors are next on the horizon, alongside touchscreen monitors for schools and universities.