AMD's new B550 chipset should lead the way for some great budget-oriented builds, if it wasn't for many B550 motherboards being so expensive. Now, Biostar has come out with its B550HM, which comes as a rather sparse option with almost no goodies to be found -- but it does have the benefits of the B550 platform.
As the board is centered around the AM4 socket, it comes with support for all current-gen Ryzen 3000 CPUs and the next-gen Ryzen 4000 chips. Wired to the socket are two DDR4 slots and one PCI-Express 4.0 slot for graphics cards. Naturally, an M.2 slot is also provided with PCIe 4.0 support.
Rear IO consists of four USB 3.2 Gen1 ports and two USB 2.0 ports, next to Gigabit Ethernet, stereo audio inputs and outputs, VGA, HDMI, and a pair of PS/2 peripheral connectors.
For those interested in using RGB with this board, you can forget about it. Being this sparse it's not surprising that no RGB is baked into the B550HM, but there are also no RGB headers to be found for controlling your case's lighting or that of components other than your GPU and RAM.
Considering all these factors, this is clearly a board aimed at casual use, or use in systems where styling or big feature sets are not required. Therefore, although we haven't heard anything about pricing, color us surprised if this board costs anything over $100, given that ASRock's similarly-equipped B550M-HDV sells for just $80.
