Asus has announced the release of its second wave of B450 motherboards. This is a somewhat surprising move considering the X570 and B550 motherboards have been released since the first wave touched our systems. This older chipset lacks the PCIe 4.0 goodness found in these newer motherboards, but is much less expensive, which has led to many B450 motherboards being used in more budget-conscious builds. As a result, many B450 motherboards are being used in lower-priced products. In fact, there are enough builds that Asus has revisited this older chipset and updated it with a few choice extras.

This interesting turn of events comes on the heels of AMD's announcement that the X470/B450 platform will not support the new Zen 3 CPU, which will be announced on October 8. There was a bit of backlash about this and AMD was forced to change its mind and eventually announced that these older platforms would indeed be supported.

However, in order to update the BIOS on these motherboards for the new chips, you need an old CPU and a new CPU. Obviously not everyone has one, and one of the features of the second wave of Asus motherboards is support for BIOS updates that do not require a CPU, a technology called BIOS flashback. This allows the BIOS to be flashed using a FAT-32 formatted USB flash drive without the need for a CPU or RAM on the motherboard. [The motherboards also feature improved cooling performance, including new alloy chokes for more efficient power conversion and high-quality thermal pads on the VRMs that allow heat to escape more easily. The new motherboard series also features Fan Xpert 4 for improved control of the system fan, water pump, and all-in-one cooler. It also supports Extreme Quiet mode, which reduces fan speed to keep the system quiet (mainly when performing light tasks).

Another new feature on this second motherboard is Asus' AI noise canceling microphone technology, which is very good at removing unwanted background noise from audio performance. Jacob had a chance to check this out a while back and was impressed. The fact that this technology is now available on motherboards is a nice bonus and worth getting, considering that many people are now working from home. AI noise cancellation is not available on all B450 II series motherboards, Note that it is only available on the newer ROG and TUF models.

The new models are as follows:

The new motherboards will be available in late October. We will update pricing information as soon as it becomes available.