The Asus ROG Strix B350-F Gaming motherboard was a decent board for its day, but it had some room for improvement. Asus has tried to renovate that room with the ROG Strix B450-F Gaming board, which brings a few feature enhancements including support for AMD's StoreMI software storage acceleration technology, which intelligently moves hard drive data to an SSD, and an enhanced layout. At $129.99, it's a solid, if not perfect, contender in the midrange market for AMD AM4 boards. Design and Storage In addition to the advantages inherent in the B450 chipset, the ROG Strix B450-F Gaming motherboard has a substantially improved layout compared to its predecessor. In the older board, Asus placed one of the PCI Express x1 slots directly below the primary PCIe x16 slot, which rendered it effectively useless for anyone using a graphics card. The company wasn't able to place the PCIe x1 slot above the B350-F's graphics card slot as this space was filled by a long M.2 Key-M 22110 slot. Asus ...
We'd avoid using both of its M.2 slots, but the ATX-size Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming is otherwise a solid AMD AM4 motherboard for a midrange Ryzen PC build.
Stable performance with StoreMI support; Improved layout compared to ROG Strix B350-F Gaming; High-end audio for the price
Using the longer M.2 slot can suppress the PCI Express x16 bandwidth