The AMD B550 Motherboard Overview: ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, ASRock, and Others

ASUS ROG Strix B550-I Gaming

The sole entrant into the mini-ITX sphere from ASUS, at least at the time of writing, will be the B550-I Gaming. In true ASUS fashion, this motherboard does things a little differently than most. One of the biggest differences is the use of a separate audio daughter board for 3.5mm jacks. This daughter board combines onto one add-in with the M.2 slot, but the motherboard also has a Type-C audio port on the rear panel, and bundles in a Type-C to 3.5mm converter.

ASUS is again going for an angled mesh look, with there being a sizeable heatsink over the power delivery that morphs into the rear IO cover, as well as what seems like the M.2 heatsink. The 8-pin power connector is in the top left corner, sufficiently out of the way (a common problem on ITX boards).

The board has three 4-pin fan headers at the top, next to RGB headers, followed by two single-sided latch DDR4 slots. Along the right hand edge of the board are a 24-pin ATX connector, a USB 3.2 header, a USB 3.0 header, and four SATA ports all angled outwards. This makes the first two easy to remove when locking connectors are used, but the two inside will be hard to remove.

The single PCIe 4.0 x16 slot is reinforced at the bottom, and above this is the add-in audio board and M.2 heatsink combination. There is an additional PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot on the rear of the motherboard.

On the back panel there is a DisplayPort, a HDMI port, a USB 2.0 port, a BIOS Flashback button, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, a 2.5 gigabit Ethernet port (I225-V), Wi-Fi 6 (AX200), audio from the S1200A custom codec with SupremeFX trimmings, and a Type-C audio output.