AMD has launched the company's Zen 4 lineup, offering us some of the best CPUs on the market. That doesn't mean that motherboard vendors have brushed off older processors. ASRock will launch the company's first all-white motherboard as the B550M Pro SE for Zen 3 and prior chips.
The B550M Pro SE isn't ASRock's first white motherboard. The company has distinctive models from the Aqua, Taichi Carrara, and Steel Legend series. However, those are typically black motherboards with white armor, whereas the upcoming B550M Pro SE is a true white motherboard from the PCB up. Interestingly, ASRock would rather launch the brand's first white motherboard with an older chipset instead of one of the newer AMD 600-series chipsets. If we had to make an educated guess, ASRock probably just refreshed one of its existing B550 motherboards along the lines of the B550M Pro4 or something to give it a new white theme.
The B550M Pro SE is a micro-ATX motherboard carrying the AM4 socket and B550 chipset. Although the AMD 500-series chipset supports Zen 3 and older processors, it won't handle all of them due to the capacity limitation of the BIOS chip. Nonetheless, we expect the B550M Pro SE to support at least the Ryzen 3000 (Matisse) and Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) series from AMD's mainstream desktop lineup and the Ryzen 3000G (Picasso), Ryzen 4000G (Renoir), and Ryzen 5000G (Cezanne) series from the APU side.
According to the B550M Pro SE renders (via Hoang Anh Phu), the motherboard seems to feature an eight-phase power delivery subsystem. The motherboard receives power from a standard 24-pin power connector and an 8-pin EPS connector. Four DDR4 memory slots support up to 128GB of memory. The data rate will depend on which Ryzen processor you pair the motherboard with, but it should do over DDR4-4733 with the right chip.
We can observe that the B550M Pro SE has two M.2 slots. Billed as the "Hyper M.2" by ASRock, that slot adheres to the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface and supports up to 80mm long M.2 drives. The secondary M.2 slot, below the chipset, should also support SSDs of the same length but limited to slower speeds. It probably sticks to PCIe 3.0 x2 like many of ASRock's other budget B550 motherboards. As for standard SATA III ports, there are four of them on the B550M Pro SE.
Like other microATX motherboards, the B550M Pro SE only supplies three expansion slots. The primary expansion slot, which features reinforced steel, operates at PCIe 4.0 x16, whereas the secondary expansion slot is limited to PCIe 3.0 x4. Logically, PCIe 4.0 support is only available on Ryzen 3000 and Ryzen 5000 processors, while the supported Ryzen APUs are still on PCIe 3.0. The motherboard also offers a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot for less bandwidth-hungry devices.
Display outputs on the B550M Pro SE include one HDMI 2.1 port and one DisplayPort 1.4 output. You'll need a Ryzen APU to use these ports since pre-Zen 4 chips didn't have integrated graphics. For connectivity, we spot a PS/2 combo port and six USB ports. The angle of the render doesn't reveal the color coding for the USB ports, so we can't say for certain the speed. However, we can see the single Ethernet port and three 3.5mm audio jacks that probably leverage a Realtek audio codec.
ASRock has already registered the B550M Pro SE with the Korea Radio Research Agency (RRA), so it shouldn't be long before we get a comprehensive specification sheet and information on pricing and availability.
