It should go without saying, this was not in any way a sponsored thread, I was just very intrigued by the fact that some mfg was releasing NEW model B450 boards, AND they were including the 2.5GbE RealTek chip onboard, which was pretty-much the reasoning (well, that and PCI-E 4.0 to GPU and NVMe) for B550 chipset release. PLUS, this B450 has BETTER compatibility, overall, with Ryzen CPUs and APUs. Seems like a win-win to me, if you can "deal" with the LACK of PCI-E 4.0. (Boo-hoo, lower NVMe benchmark scores. Not that they matter all that much in the real world, unless you're 8K video-editing or running a VM server.)
I'm currently running an Asus B450-F ROG STRIX Gaming ATX mobo, on which the onboard 1GbE NIC died, so I have a Chinese-made RTL8125(B?) PCI-E x1 2.5GbE-T NIC onboard, that I'm actually using @ 2.5GbE, to a Microtik 4-port SFP+ switch, with 10GbE-T copper transcievers, of the brand that will successfully "step-down" to multi-Gig speeds like 2.5/5.0.
I'm not really all that happy with the B450-F ROG STRIX, I mean, it works, but I had to really "wedge" it into my case (because of my top-mounted water-cooling), if only my case were like 3-4 mm higher, I wouldn't have had the problems that I did mounting this thing.
The thing is, I have two GPUs, an RX 5700 as primary, and a GTX 1660ti as secondary, and if I used this Asus B450M-PRO S board, the two PCI-E x16 (physical) slots are two slots apart, so the cards would be bumping up against one another. I went through that with three ASRock B350M Pro4 boards, with the two-wide difference in the x16 slots, and some of my XFX RX 470 cards actually had rings etched in their backplates, from the fans hubs of the the other card wedged right next to it. To say nothing of extreme temps and difficulty cooling two cards that close together.
That's why I was hoping that they would also release an ATX board, with better slot spacing for two GPUs, and the dual M.2 slots, WITH the RealTek 2.5GbE-T NIC onboard. For around the same price or so of my B450-F ROG STRIX, more or less, give or take $10-15 for the 2.5GbE-T NIC chip. (I only paid $20 for the cards, shipped from China, so the actual NIC chip couldn't have cost all that much.)