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 TUF Gaming B550M-Plus + Wi-Fi
For the TUF small form factor board, technically ASUS is going to offer two different models here, one with AX200 Wi-Fi 6 and one without. The price for the B550M-Plus with the Wi-Fi is an extra $20, which is in-line with what we’ve seen from other Wi-Fi 6 variants. At $160 for the base model, it still feels as if this should be on the high-end for a budget chipset, but this is actually around the middle.
The ASUS TUF Gaming B550M-Plus (and Wi-Fi variant) follow similar design cues to the ATX B550-Plus model. It’s a similar styling with grey diagonal lines from top left to bottom right, with some TUF yellow thrown in, and the chipset heatsink covers both sides of the power delivery, but without a heatpipe.
The CPU is powered by a single 8-pin to the top left, and the socket area has access to three 4-pin fan headers within easy reach. The memory slots are all single-sided latch designs, and down the right of the board we get only a 24-pin ATX power connector and a USB 3.0 header. For this board, ASUS has moved all the SATA ports to the bottom of the board! At least in this configuration, it makes removing any of them very easy to do.
The PCIe configuration for the board shows that the top slot is focused on the PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, without a heatsink so users can have their own. Below this is the main PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, with additional reinforcement. We have then a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot from the chipset, and a full-length PCIe 3.0 x4 slot from the chipset. The chipset heatsink, like on the B550-Plus is relatively small but should be sufficient.
Along the bottom of the motherboard we get a COM header, RGB LED headers, another 4-pin fan header, two USB 2.0 headers, the front panel header, and the four SATA ports. The audio system uses the same S1200A audio codec as the ROG Strix family, but without the additional amps.
On the rear panel we get a combination PS/2 connector, two USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a BIOS Flashback button, Wi-Fi ports (for the Wi-Fi model), a DisplayPort, a HDMI port, 2.5 gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RTL8125B), a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and the audio jacks.
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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.