The RB450Gx4 is a bare router board with five gigabit ports. No Wi-Fi, no modem, no display: a board for a cabinet, an enclosure of your own, or a rack. The catalogue lists it with the default configuration router and ether1 as the WAN port, and with a verified port layout.
What makes it interesting among the small routers is what is inside: a quad-core ARM processor and 1 GB of memory. For a five-port board that is ample, and it means things fit here that do not fit on a smaller board.
The ports
ether1: 1 Gbit, your WAN port by default.ether2throughether4: 1 Gbit, ordinary LAN ports.ether5: 1 Gbit, with PoE-out. This is the only feeding port on this model.
Because there is exactly one feeding port, the PoE-out per port field appears with only ether5 in its list. Per port you choose auto-on, forced-on or off. Our catalogue says nothing about the power that port can deliver: the tool knows which port can feed, not how much. See PoE-out per port.
Five ports is well above the three the VLAN roles demand. What joins the bridge and which port becomes the trunk is covered in Bridge and ports and VLANs.
What is inside
From the catalogue: ARM 32bit, 1 GB of memory, licence level 5 and the IPQ-4019 switch chip. With 1 GB the small-board warning never appears, and level 5 is enough for everything the tool writes for a router; see RouterOS licences.
hw_vlan is empty for this model, so you will not get the warning that bridge VLAN filtering turns hardware offload off. The Hardware offloading (switch chip) toggle under Ports is on by default; leave it on.
No radios and no modem, so no Wi-Fi package and no Wi-Fi generation in the catalogue entry.
What it is good at, and where it runs out
Good at: being a small router with room to spare. With 1 GB of memory you can think about containers, a larger firewall or a VPN endpoint without memory being the limit. As a VLAN router for a small office it does the job too.
Where it runs out:
- No Wi-Fi. All Wi-Fi roles are greyed out with "No wifi radio". Wi-Fi comes from access points behind it, centrally managed if you want; see CAPsMAN.
- No modem. LTE / 5G router is greyed out with "No LTE modem".
- One feeding port. Powering more than one device is not possible.
- No fibre. Five copper ports and nothing else; if fibre arrives you need a media converter or a switch.
- Throughput figures. Our catalogue does not record them. What you get depends on your firewall rules, fasttrack and queues; see QoS and bandwidth.
Which roles fit
- Office router with VLANs: the obvious choice. Five ports is enough for WAN, LAN and a trunk to a switch or access point.
- Home router: simpler, one network.
- VPN gateway: available, and with this memory a realistic option; see WireGuard.
- Router + CAPsMAN and Hotspot: available, because there are five wired ports.
- Core router: offered. For a small network with OSPF that works, but the role writes no NAT and no bridge.
- Switch: technically offered; a waste of a board built to route.
- Harden only (baseline): for a board that is already running.
The quickest route to a working configuration
- Pick One device and search for
RB450. - Pick Office router with VLANs, or Home router for a single network.
- Fill in the internet connection on
ether1. - Walk through the VLAN step: mark one VLAN as management and watch which port becomes the trunk.
- If you want PoE-out on
ether5, set it in advanced under Ports. - Set an admin password, reset the board and paste the script. See Using the script.
What trips people up
- Looking for PoE on the wrong port. Only
ether5feeds, which is why the tool's list leaves the others out. - Forgetting it is a bare board. Enclosure, power supply and mounting are not included by default.
- Putting the management VLAN untagged on an ordinary port. That leaves your management network open; send it tagged to your switch.
- Forgetting the trunk on the other side. A VLAN that exists on only one end of the cable does not work; see VLAN checks.
- Locking yourself out. Write the management address down before you paste; see Locked out.