Review on 🎮 ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming II AMD AM4 (Ryzen 5000, 3rd Gen Ryzen) ATX Gaming Motherboard: 8+4 Power Stages, HDMI 2.0b/DP, 2 x PCIe 3.0 x16, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, BIOS Flashback, 256Mb BIOS Flash ROM by Evan Haynes

Pros: Incredible speed when paired with Ryzen7 2700X. Has all the features I need at a good price. Cons: When using an M.2 SSD, the board disables SATA ports 5 and 6. This is an expected and documented behavior. This becomes a problem when the SATA 3/4 ports suddenly stop working and you are left with only 2 SATA ports. I didn't notice any problems during the initial installation. My configuration consisted of an M.2 SSD as the system drive, a 4TB SATA HDD in SATA 1 for storage, a Blu-ray burner in SATA2, and a SATA SSD for user data in SATA3. After installing the drivers and software and a few reboots, I noticed that my user data disk was missing. I couldn't find it in the hardware manager. When I went into the BIOS I saw it in the list. I switched cables and tried again and it no longer showed up in BIOS or Windows. Swapping cables between SATA1/2 devices and missing devices caused the missing devices to appear and other devices to disappear. I tried different cable and connector configurations. All signs pointed to bad SATA connectors on the motherboard. I removed the M.2 drive and checked again as this will remove any disabled ports. SATA 1/2 and 5/6 register devices but nothing with 3/4 in BIOS. I also noticed that the front lighting no longer works. Checking the voltages on the contacts showed that they are not there, although they should be. Apparently there is a problem with this board. Thoughts: I could move the M.2 to another slot and access SATA 5/6 which would give me the SATA ports I need, but this takes the GPU bus and flips it from 16x to 8x. This was not an acceptable concession to get a working system. In the end, just because the components don't seem to work after a few days of ownership doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of this particular board. I have RMAed and am waiting for a replacement.