We've been expecting AMD to unveil its B550 chipset for quite some time now, but to no avail. The B550A chipset did rear its head, but underneath its fancy naming, it was really just a B450 chipset for OEMs that didn't have PCIe 4.0 disabled on its main PCIe x16 slot when used in tandem with a Ryzen 3000-series CPU. However, it looks like the waiting might be coming to an end, as the folks at Videocardz.com have kleaked an image of the Soyo 丐板 B550M.
That's not to say that there's a lot of meat on this bone. In fact, the Soyo Micro-ATX motherboard is quite barebones, offering the basics and not a thing more, other than the dragon graphic on its brown PCB.
this is obviously a very low-cost motherboard option, and Soyo makes no attempt at hiding this. The motherboard's name "丐板" translates to "Beggar," so there you have it: the Soyo Beggar B550M.
It comes with the AM4 socket, two DDR4 memory slots, two PCIe x16 slots (though the bottom one will only support a maximum of eight lanes), an M.2 slot, four SATA III connectors, some USB 3.1 and a USB 3.0 header, and that's it. Seeing four fan connectors on a budget board like this is nice, but there is a distinct lack of a USB Type-C front panel header, as well as heatsinks for the chipset and VRM. It does look like the board will ship with the heatsinks though, as there do appear to be mounting points.
In all likelihood, when AMD does decide to formally unveil its B550 chipset, the name-brand motherboard manufacturers such as Asus, ASRock, MSI, Gigabyte, and others will certainly dress them up with better features, such as beefier VRMs, addressable-RGB, USB Type-C, fancy heatsinks, good audio circuitry, and more.
However, we have no idea when that will be, so the waiting game continues.
