MSI PRO B550M-P GEN3 Motherboard, Micro-ATX, AM4 - AMD Ryzen 5000 Ready - DDR4 Boost 4400+MHz/OC, PCIe 3.0 x16 Slot, 1 x M.2 Gen3 Slot, 1G LAN

Product Information

Before we get into testing, let's briefly discuss why B550 motherboards are more expensive than what most were expecting. For this discussion we'll use the MSI B550 range as a point of reference for a number of reasons: they had some of the best quality B450 boards with the Tomahawk and Pro Carbon, we have two of their new B550 boards for testing, and they also provided us with a detailed breakdown of their entire B550 range, including VRM configurations and pricing. At long last AMD more budget-oriented B550 motherboards will finally go on sale. There's been plenty of talk about the B550 chipset and all the supporting boards for weeks, and we're now able to share our results with you. On hand for testing today we have the MSI B550M Mortar, MSI B550 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro and Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master. AMD B550 AORUS Motherboard with 10+2 Phases Digital Twin Power Design, Enlarged Surface Heatsinks, PCIe 4.0 x16 Slot, Dual PCIe 4.0/3.0 x4 M.2 with One Thermal Guard, 2.5GbE LAN, RGB FUSION 2.0, Q-Flash Plus In the middle of the board, we spot three PCIe slots: two full-length and one single x1 size slot. The primary GPU slot uses Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable PCIe armor for additional shearing protection and retention strength for heavy video cards. The top slot is fed from the CPU and runs at PCIe 4.0 x16 speeds. The second full-length slot is fed from the chipset and runs at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds. Meanwhile, the x1 slot, also sourced from the chipset, runs at PCIe 3.0 x1 speeds. The only concern I have with this configuration is the x1 slot’s location. If you use anything more than a single-slot video card, it will cover the x1 slot, making it unusable. That said, it’s a MicroATX board, so there isn’t a lot of room and many similarly-sized boards run into the same issue.

Well, with the amount of cores that these higher end builds may have, setting up a small VM for a server is a piece of cake. Why have the expense of a completely separate machine when you can take the one you have, allocate 2 out of 16 cores to it, some ram, and then just add 3 or 4 large HDDs for your server. AMD Ryzen series APUs (Renoir) support DDR4 4733+(OC) / 4666(OC) / 4600(OC) / 4533(OC) / 4466(OC) / 4400(OC) / 4333(OC) / 4266(OC) / 4200(OC) / 4133(OC) / 4000(OC) / 3866(OC) / 3800(OC) / 3733(OC) / 3600(OC) / 3466(OC) / 3200 / 2933 / 2667 / 2400 / 2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory * AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Matisse) support DDR4 4533+(OC) / 4466(OC) / 4400(OC) / 4333(OC) / 4266(OC) / 4200(OC) / 4133(OC) / 4000(OC) / 3866(OC) / 3800(OC) / 3733(OC) / 3600(OC) / 3466(OC) / 3200 / 2933 / 2667 / 2400 / 2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory * Supports DDR4 2667/ 2800 /2933 /3000 /3066 /3200 /3466 /3600/ 3733 /3866 /4000 /4133 /4266 /4400+ MHz by A-XMP OC MODEThe best result we've recorded to date of any AM4 motherboard was the Aorus Xtreme at 55C while the worst result technically comes from the MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi which had to throttle the CPU during this test for its own survival. The X570-A Pro ran hotter, but avoided throttling in this test. AMD Ryzen series APUs (Cezanne) support DDR4 4733+(OC) / 4666(OC) / 4600(OC) / 4533(OC) / 4466(OC) / 4400(OC) / 4333(OC) / 4266(OC) / 4200(OC) / 4133(OC) / 4000(OC) / 3866(OC) / 3800(OC) / 3733(OC) / 3600(OC) / 3466(OC) / 3200 / 2933 / 2667 / 2400 / 2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory *

This was a very lazy review. All of the cons really are not cons for 99% of the people building a mATX build. Across the bottom are a bunch of buttons and headers, including multiple USB ports and RGB headers. Here’s the full list, from left to right: Moving down to the bottom third, the audio section on the left is in plain sight, not using any shrouds or faraday cages for the Realtek ALC1200 codec. We also see four gold Nippon audio capacitors. We don’t find any fancy op amps or the like here. However, the audio solution should still be fine for most users.Rather than installing the boards in an ATX case like we often do, we're using an open air-test bed with no direct air-flow. However, through further testing we've found that the results in a poorly ventilated case are actually worse, so we guess this isn't an absolute worst case scenario, no pun intended. Placing load on the CPU is Blender running the Gooseberry workload and the temperatures are reported after an hour. Then in terms of features, you're getting an additional M.2 slot which supports PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and of course, the primary PCIe x16 slot supports PCIe 4.0 as well. Other features include USB 3.2 Gen 2, 2.5 Gigabit LAN, front USB Type-C, M.2 shields, better PCB, pre-installed I/O shield, much larger VRM cooling to go with the bigger VRM, a better board layout and just a higher quality motherboard in general. There's really no comparing the two generations as they're in completely different tiers, and pricing reflects that.