A new range of mid-range motherboards sporting the B450 chipset have been unveiled by Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte which offer plenty of features but scaled back a little from the peak offerings. They aren't going to blow anyone away, but should make the Ryzen platform, be that the first or second generation, even more cost effective for those looking to upgrade their CPU in the near future.
Features for the new B450 Aorus Pro and B450 Aorus Elite from Gigabyte include dual-channel DDR4 memory support across four dimms, USB-A and USB-C 3.1 ports on the rear, dual M.2 ports with thermal heatspreaders, and dual BIOS support for those who like to flash.
Gigabyte also has a couple of wireless-orientated motherboards which feature built in Wi-Fi connectivity to easy connection without an Ethernet cable or wireless adaptor.
ASUS has similar offerings, though has more performance orientated options which offer support for memory overclocking up to DDR4-3600, as well as more advanced cooling on some of its larger board offerings.
What's great about these boards though, is that the B450 chipset has almost identical feature parity with the X470 and X370. There are slightly fewer USB connections, but it still features the same eight PCIExpress 2.0 lanes and Crossfire support. There's no SLI support, but it does support StoreMI technology and manual overclocking of any Ryzen CPU.
As Hexus reports, we don't have final release dates or pricing information for these boards just yet, but we'd expect them to debut in the very near future at a noticeably lower cost than existing higher-end boards.
