ASUS’ ROG Strix B450-F Gaming smiles for the camera

ASUS' ROG Strix B450-F Gaming smiles for the camera

ASUS’ ROG Strix B450-F Gaming smiles for the camera

ASUS has started to show off their latest AMD motherboards at Computex 2018, revealing their first B450 designs. AMD’s B450 chipset is designed to offer a balance between affordability and performance, offering fewer features than X470 while delivering overclockability and most of the features that end-users should expect. 

Below is ASUS’ ROG Strix B450-F Gaming, which offers users two M.2 slots, up to six SATA ports and seven USB 3.1 ports (2x Gen 2 and 5x Gen 1). This motherboard is expected to hit retail for a price of around $120, delivering buyers a lot of value for money.

AMD’s B450 chipset will support AMD’s latest Ryzen 2nd Generation processors out of the box, an essential upgrade over B350, as not all B350 motherboards ship with Ryzen 2000-series compatible BIOS revisions. 

To the side of the image, ASUS says that this motherboard will support 3200Mhz memory out of the box and use an Intel i219-V Gigabit Ethernet LAN controller. On the RGB-side this motherboard will support a glowing ROG logo on the I/O shield as well as a few addressable RGB headers. 

The B450-F Gaming has two M.2 slots, one of which is PCIe 3.0 4x while the other is PCIe 2.0 4x, with the second slot offering less bandwidth. One of the limitations of B450 is its restriction to a single full PCIe 16x slot, making multi-GPU systems problematic. That being said SLI and Crossfire are becoming increasingly uncommon, making this a non-issue for AMD’s low-cost B450 chipset. 

The second PCIe 16x slot on the B450-F Gaming is electrically 4x, giving it access to a mere 25% of the bandwidth of a full 16x lane setup. 

  

ASUS' ROG Strix B450-F Gaming smiles for the camera

(Image from Techpowerup)

  
AMD’s B450 chipset offers gamers the necessities, delivering everything that end users require for a single-GPU setup, plenty of storage and decent levels of CPU performance. B450 is the affordable all-rounder of modern AMD chipsets. 

You can join the discussion on ASUS’s ROG Strix B450-F Gaming motherboard on the OC3D Forums.Â