AMD B550 Motherboards Now Available For Preorder Starting at $115

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Time to break your piggy bank.

B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ax

B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ax (Image credit: ASRock)
Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician

Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • InvalidError
    Wonder what those will settle down to, MSRPs look ridiculous. Eight phases appears to have become baseline, I bet a lot of these are going to fare worse than well-designed 4-6 phases. ASROCK's Phantom is getting roasted by reviewers for having one of the worst VRMs ever on the Intel side of thing, might establish the low watermark for B550 too.
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    InvalidError said:
    Wonder what those will settle down to, MSRPs look ridiculous. Eight phases appears to have become baseline, I bet a lot of these are going to fare worse than well-designed 4-6 phases. ASROCK's Phantom is getting roasted by reviewers for having one of the worst VRMs ever on the Intel side of thing, might establish the low watermark for B550 too.
    IIRC, the asrock X570 boards were fine, the MSI X570 were worse. MSI improved and in the Z490, it fared better and Asrock became worse. So its better wait for reviews rather than pre order.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    InvalidError said:
    ASROCK's Phantom is getting roasted by reviewers for having one of the worst VRMs ever on the Intel side of thing, might establish the low watermark for B550 too.
    Yeah, Asrock's lower-end boards this generation look pretty weak. VRM performance might not be as bad as it is on the Intel boards though, since the power draw for Ryzen 3000 processors should be lower. So at the very least, we might not see the higher-end parts VRM-throttling down to base-clocks. Even if they manage to perform okay now though, it's hard to say how they will cope with future processors.

    Back-panel connectivity on a lot of these lower-priced boards looks a bit bare-bones too though, considering the starting prices relative to B450. B550 boards don't really look particularly great until you get around the $160 price range, which is moving into X570 territory. The difference in pricing between B550 and X570 doesn't seem particularly large for a given feature-set. I kind of get the impression that manufacturers might have hiked launch prices a bit due to the current B450 shortages.
    Reply
  • escksu
    cryoburner said:
    Yeah, Asrock's lower-end boards this generation look pretty weak. VRM performance might not be as bad as it is on the Intel boards though, since the power draw for Ryzen 3000 processors should be lower. So at the very least, we might not see the higher-end parts VRM-throttling down to base-clocks. Even if they manage to perform okay now though, it's hard to say how they will cope with future processors.

    Back-panel connectivity on a lot of these lower-priced boards looks a bit bare-bones too though, considering the starting prices relative to B450. B550 boards don't really look particularly great until you get around the $160 price range, which is moving into X570 territory. The difference in pricing between B550 and X570 doesn't seem particularly large for a given feature-set. I kind of get the impression that manufacturers might have hiked launch prices a bit due to the current B450 shortages.

    There isn't that big of a difference between B550 and X570 to begin with. This is because the PCIE 4.0 comes from the CPU. The main difference is just the uplink (pcie 3.0 vs 4.0). Although you get more SATA, USB etc.... I wouldn't consider them major differences.

    Although x570 chipset also provides you with 16 PCIE 4.0 lanes, but the extra bandwidth from PCIE 4.0 cannot be fully utilised. This is because the uplink is just 4 lanes.

    Depending on board design, manufacturers may utilise the chipset for additional M.2 slots. So, where you install your M.2 drive may have an effect on performance. If you utilise all the slots for RAID, then you may face bottleneck.
    Reply
  • SysBuff
    cryoburner said:
    I kind of get the impression that manufacturers might have hiked launch prices a bit due to the current B450 shortages.
    There's a shortage of many components, not just B450 boards. I also think that one of the reasons for the inflated B550 prices is the imminent arrival of A520 boards, that will be the true entry level models.
    Reply
  • nofanneeded
    escksu said:
    There isn't that big of a difference between B550 and X570 to begin with. This is because the PCIE 4.0 comes from the CPU. The main difference is just the uplink (pcie 3.0 vs 4.0). Although you get more SATA, USB etc.... I wouldn't consider them major differences.

    Although x570 chipset also provides you with 16 PCIE 4.0 lanes, but the extra bandwidth from PCIE 4.0 cannot be fully utilised. This is because the uplink is just 4 lanes.

    Depending on board design, manufacturers may utilise the chipset for additional M.2 slots. So, where you install your M.2 drive may have an effect on performance. If you utilise all the slots for RAID, then you may face bottleneck.

    People tend to think that the extra chipset lanes are bad because of the 4 lanes only to CPU , well they miss the point , it is not about the total lanes bandwidth , it is about having the ability to add more hardware to they system and thats it , and 99% of use you will not use them together .. you will never see the bottleneck at all ..
    Reply
  • escksu
    nofanneeded said:
    People tend to think that the extra chipset lanes are bad because of the 4 lanes only to CPU , well they miss the point , it is not about the total lanes bandwidth , it is about having the ability to add more hardware to they system and thats it , and 99% of use you will not use them together .. you will never see the bottleneck at all ..

    If the purpose is just about adding more hardware, then pcie 4.0 serves no purpose since 3.0 can do everything. Cost less and runs cooler too.

    Yes, its sufficient if you run only 1 ssd on the chipset. But if you runs 2, then no.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    escksu said:
    If the purpose is just about adding more hardware, then pcie 4.0 serves no purpose since 3.0 can do everything.
    While PCIe 3.0 may be enough for most stuff available today, systems new enough to have PCIe 4.0 today will likely still be powerful enough to be useful 5-10 years from now and it is extremely likely that PCIe 4.0 will be necessary to get the most out of new stuff at some point between now and then.

    PCIe 3.0 was good enough for everyone... until NVMe SSDs came about and almost immediately made 3.0 seem no longer adequate and 4.0 SSDs are about to make even 4.0 look uncomfortably tight.
    Reply
  • nofanneeded
    escksu said:
    If the purpose is just about adding more hardware, then pcie 4.0 serves no purpose since 3.0 can do everything. Cost less and runs cooler too.

    Yes, its sufficient if you run only 1 ssd on the chipset. But if you runs 2, then no.

    actually you can run 3 M2 on chipset if the motherboard connects all the lanes and this is very useful , in case you want more space and your M2 drives are full you will need to add another one for more storage , not for more performance ...

    and PCIe 4.0 came with Gen4 link between the CPU and Chipset , so it is still useful and can give you full speed as well .
    Reply
  • escksu
    nofanneeded said:
    actually you can run 3 M2 on chipset if the motherboard connects all the lanes and this is very useful , in case you want more space and your M2 drives are full you will need to add another one for more storage , not for more performance ...

    and PCIe 4.0 came with Gen4 link between the CPU and Chipset , so it is still useful and can give you full speed as well .

    Yes, you can connect 3 x M.2 PCIE 4.0 SSDs on x570 chipset.
    However, the bandwidth you have is ~8GB/s. As long you don't try to run them in RAID 0, you are fine. Single PCIE 4.0 SSD can hit 5GB/s transfer rate. So 3 of them is max 15GB/s. Sequential read/write is very close to max in benchmarks. OF course, this is not real world performance but it definitely will saturate the 8GB/s link.

    Also take note that this 8GB/s link is used by USB, SATA, NIC, audio etc. It may also be used by other PCIE Slots, depending on how its implemented. x570 chipset allows up to 16 lanes on the chipset.
    Reply