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. This was a very lazy review. All of the cons really are not cons for 99% of the people building a mATX build. 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. 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:

For recording temperatures we're using a digital thermometer with K-Type thermocouples and we'll be reporting the peak rear PCB temperature. We're also not reporting Delta T over Ambient, instead we maintain a room temperature of 21 degrees as this is by far the most accurate way to conduct this testing. Monitoring the ambient temperature is a thermocouple positioned next to the test system.

Overvoltage Protection

AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Vermeer) 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 * kaalus said:Why would you want more than 4 SATA ports? 4 is too many already, 2 would be perfectly fine. SATA is legacy anyway, and most people should have their harddrives in a server, not in their desktop. No WiFI? That's a plus. And who needs so many USB ports? 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 * If you bought a Ryzen 5 3600 a year ago, there's a real possibility that you might want to buy a Zen 3 part with more cores, but we guess that's a story for later in the year.

Supports AMD Ryzen™ 5000 & 3000 Series desktop processors (not compatible with AMD Ryzen™ 5 3400G & Ryzen™ 3 3200G) and AMD Ryzen™ 4000 G-Series desktop processors

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 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 * 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 * Personally, 4 SATA ports is just about perfect. 1 NVME M.2 port for the boot drive, 1 SATA for large storage for the main machine and 3 SATA for the VM server. Or, just put all 4 SATAs to the VM and map the large storage for the main system to the server. It would almost be as fast as local storage.