The AMD B550 Motherboard Overview: ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, ASRock, and Others
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on June 16, 2020 11:00 AM ESTASUS 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.
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Lucky Stripes 99 - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
I've read elsewhere that Zen1 processors supposedly had a 128 Mb address limit for UEFI firmware. It sounds suspect, but looking back at early AM4 boards, I don't recall any with either 256 Mb chips or striped 128 Mb chips, so maybe it wasn't simply due to the significant jump in price for 256 Mb chips over 128 Mb ones.Redstorm - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Likewise, looking to replace my aging 7 year old HTPC with a mATX B550 and a Ryzen 4700G but radio silence from AMD on releasing compatiable APU's for the B550's, We now have the long overdue Budget motherboards but no APU's. Dissapointed.alufan - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
I understand the frustration however if your buying a Budget Board then surely a budget CPU is the best fit, also new APUs are inbound according to all the rumours, meanwhile your older APU will fit just fine I believe, I expect the new APUs will have Navi cores as per the Xbox and PS5 but of course they probably cannot be released until the new Navi cards and consoles are out, think about it though what a sea chamge folks are now waiting eagerly for a new release from AMD because they know it will kick ass not close the gap to Intel, its a good time to be a customer!Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
Older APUs aren't supported on B550DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
I think you forgot something... :-)Fortunately, this component is a unique motherboard among B550 and well worth reading up on [add link].
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Interesting that the GIGABYTE B550 Vision D board's Type-C ports don't have the Thunderbolt logo next to them. I wonder if Intel won't all the logo to be use on AMD systems.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
*allowDigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
"Although on paper, there isn't much difference between B450 and B550 with slightly more SATA available due to the removable of eSATA support, both remain PCIe 3.0 bound."The B450 only had PCIe 2.0 lanes. Huge difference from the B550 IMO
Lucky Stripes 99 - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Agreed. That's going to make a huge difference for boards with secondary or tertiary M.2 or U.2 ports that hangs off the chipset. That goes double if they only get 2 PCIe lanes instead of the full 4.a5cent - Friday, June 19, 2020 - link
Yup, exactly what I thought.Equally "BIG" is that B550 finally has more PCIe lanes, so adding more NVMe drives doesn't require downgrading other ports like it always did on B450.
B450 was a firmware upgrade for the budget B350 chipset. B550 is the first time this tier of AMD chipset doesn't suck.