Asus Prime B550M-A Wi-Fi Review: Affordable, Hot Running Micro-ATX

Asus’ Prime B550M-A Wi-Fi is inexpensive and (mostly) full-featured.

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Software

Asus includes a few applications designed for a variety of functions, including RGB lighting control, audio, system monitoring, and overclocking. Below, we’ve captured several screenshots of AISuite and Armory Crate.

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Firmware

To give you a taste of the Firmware, we’ve gathered screenshots showing a majority of the BIOS screens. There’s not much here we haven’t seen before. The theme is different compared to the ROG boards. You get  a black, white and blue color scheme, but outside of that, it is still a typical Asus BIOS. Most functions are not buried deep within the menus, and it’s generally easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for.

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Test System and Comparison Products 

Our test system uses Windows 10 64-bit OS (1909) with all threat mitigations applied. The motherboard BIOS used is the latest non-beta available to the public unless otherwise noted. The hardware used is as follows: 

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CPUAMD Ryzen R9 3900XRow 0 - Cell 2
MemoryG.Skill Trident Z Neo 2x8GB DDR4 3600 (F4-3600C16Q-32GTZN)Row 1 - Cell 2
GPUAsus ROG Strix RTX 2070Row 2 - Cell 2
CPU CoolerCorsair H150iRow 3 - Cell 2
PSUCorsair AX1200iRow 4 - Cell 2
SoftwareWindows 10 64-bit 1909Row 5 - Cell 2
Graphics DriverNvidia Driver 445.75Row 6 - Cell 2
SoundIntegrated HD audioRow 7 - Cell 2
NetworkIntegrated Networking (GbE or 2.5 GbE)Row 8 - Cell 2
Graphics DriverGeForce 445.74Row 9 - Cell 2

For this review, we’ll be comparing the Asus Prime B550M-A Wi-Fi against other B550 motherboards. At this time, we do not have any direct comparisons (by board size, Micro ATX), but we’ll see more of these in the coming weeks. This includes the ASRock B550M-HDV ($80.99), MSI B550M Pro-VDH Wi-Fi ($109.99), Gigabyte B550M DS3H ($94.99), and the this board’s little brother, the Asus Prime B500M-K ($120.99). 

Benchmark Settings

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Synthetic Benchmarks and SettingsHeader Cell - Column 1
PCMark 10Version 2.1.2177 64
Row 1 - Cell 0 Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation, MS Office
3DMarkVersion 2.11.6866 64
Row 3 - Cell 0 Firestrike Extreme and Time Spy Default Presets
Cinebench R20Version RBBENCHMARK271150
Row 5 - Cell 0 Open GL Benchmark - Single and Multi-threaded
Application Tests and SettingsRow 6 - Cell 1
LAME MP3Version SSE2_2019
Row 8 - Cell 0 Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160Kb/s)
HandBrake CLIVersion: 1.2.2
Row 10 - Cell 0 Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19GB 4K mkv to x264 (light AVX) and x265 (heavy AVX) 
Corona 1.4Version 1.4
Row 12 - Cell 0 Custom benchmark
7-ZipVersion 19.00
Row 14 - Cell 0 Integrated benchmark
Game Tests and SettingsRow 15 - Cell 1
The Division 2Ultra Preset - 1920 x 1080
Forza Horizon 4Ultra Preset - 1920 x 1080

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Joe Shields
Joe Shields
Motherboard Reviewer

Joe Shields is a Freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US. He reviews motherboards.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • AlB80
    This board has VRM with 4+2 phases and only 3 capacitors in the 12V filter. I think a 95-105W CPU with PBO can rip(ple) them fast.
    Reply
  • HideOut
    ...and has the cheast sound you can get. Its only a couple bucks more to at least upgrade to 1200 sound (not even the newer 12xx ones). Sounds like a board designed only to run 65W chips, especially if you want to OC One. if you arnt going to OC just get the new 520 boards that are cheaper.
    Reply
  • Willz81
    It was mentioned in the article "All ports and M.2 sockets can work simultaneously -- there is no lane sharing with this configuration." Does this mean that you can have a GPU and 2 x M.2 SSD's running simultaneously without any problems? I have a AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G and I can't seem to find any documentation on ASUS website or anything about the allowed PCIe configuration! I understand that if I use the two M.2 SSD slots I can only use SATA_3 and SATA_4 slots. So ultimately what I want to do is use the PCIex16 for GPU and 2 x M.2 SSD slots and SATA_3 and SATA_4 all together at the same time.
    Reply