Asus ProArt B550 Creator Review: Designed for Pros, Works for Joes

dual thunderbolt is NOT worth $125. You can find boards with one 2.5g and more sata and such WITH 12xx autio for $150 all day. If you want more LAN bandwidth you can get all that + 10gb ethernet for alot less too, and get more M2 ports and sata ports. This board makes no sense to me.

Here is a very overpriced add-in card you can use for dual Tbolt 4, even from Asus. https://www.newegg.com/asus-90mc09p0-m0aay0-pci-express-to-thunderbolt/p/N82E16815293048?Description=thunderbolt&cm_re=thunderbolt-_-15-293-048-_-Product&quicklink=true

I own this motherboard for 4 months now and it works pretty reliably so far. There is no good reason to complain about not having third M.2 slot, as B550 platform has set amount of available PCIe lanes. Besides, one can always purchase higher capacity NVMe storage to meet their needs on two slots. Simple. Less e-waste and plastic for packaging.

Designers of the board maxed out on connectivity, working with what is available. Well done to them. Two TB4 ports use x4 PCIe 3.0 lanes and bring more versatility than having another M.2 slot. Super fast external storage can be attached at any time, such as TB3 NAS/DAS, plus display, plus TB docking station, plus 10 GbE networking, etc. Plenty of options. How much more one could possibly want with B550?

For those who stubbornly desire third M.2 slot, this board is flexible enough in configuration and you have additional two options: use x4 PCIe 3.0 slot on the chipset for expansion card with NVMe drive (this turns off TB4) or use x8 PCIe 4.0 second GPU slot to attach two NVMe 4.0 drives. Suddenly, you can have 3 NVMe 4.0 drives and 1 NVMe 3.0. Not enough? Leaving GPU to operate in the first x8 PCIe 4.0 slot will be just fine. GPUs still cannot saturate fully x16 PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, so it will work fine in x8 PCIe 4.0 slot with the same bandwidth as x16 PCIe 3.0. Testing GPUs in x8 PCIe 4.0 vs. x16 PCIe 4.0 slot showed negligible difference. Higly recommended motherboard.

I've been using this board for a couple of months now and it's been great. The only issue I had was that screen sharing in Discord would cause all my USB ports to stop working - an issue with the B550 chipset that AMD had fixed via microcode for BIOS updates quite a while ago but for some reason the BIOS that ASUS sold the boards with (which came out after the AMD fixes) did not have the relevant microcode fixes. ASUS did finally release a BIOS update last month that let me fix the issue though.

This board made complete sense to me as the add-in Thunderbolt cards are reportedly a bit flakey whereas the Thunderbolt support on this board is supposed to be rock solid. I don't currently use the Thunderbolt functionality but I'm going to be reconfiguring my home office within the next six months or so and I'm likely going to go hide the computer away in a hidden storage area at the other end of my office and so like the idea of using a Corning optical thunderbolt cable connected to a dock to connect my main devices. I just wanted that future proof functionality.

Admin said:

The Asus ProArt B550 Creator offers dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C and 2.5 GbE ports, along with a mid-range $299.99 price. If you can work with limited speedy internal storage, this is a solid option. Otherwise, the X570 platform may be a better choice due to the additional PCIe lanes/storage flexibility.

Asus ProArt B550 Creator Review: Designed for Pros, Works for Joes : Read more

I'd kindly request from Joe Shields to communicate to Asus and challenge them on the marketing claim that this motherboard hosts "HDMI 2.1" port on the back panel. They say, quote: "HDMI 2.1 (4K60)". "4K/60" is vague enough to be considered a feature specific to HDMI 2.1 spec.
4K/60 10/12-bit RGB image would qualify as HDMI 2.1 feature, becasue it requires more than 18 Gbps of bandwidth for transport and this can only be done with new FRL protocol introduced by HDMI 2.1 spec
4K/60 8-bit RGB can work over older TMDS protocol, which is standard HDMI 2.0b
So, not all "4K/60" signals are the same and can be delivered both by older TMDS protocol and newer FRL, depending on bit depth and required bandwidth.

I have challenged them twice via email and they have never answered my questions as regards to which specific features from HDMI 2.1 spec does this HDMI port support and how those features are anabled. One member of technical support team told me that the port supports older 1.4 spec speeds (10.2 Gbps), which is closer to truth on Vega platform.

There could be only two ways how HDMI 2.1 can work on a motherboard:
1. APU natively outputs FRL faster signal. FRL is core part of HDMI 2.1 spec
No current APU from AMD, including Ryzen 5000G series, support FRL signalling. Those APUs output HDMI signal by using older TMDS pixel clocks by Vega iGPU. By the way, Intel's CPUs neither have this capability.

2. APU is helped by additional level shifter/conversion chip DP 1.4-HDMI 2.1
Close shots of the motherboard in TechPowerUp review do not show that such chip is installed. So, has Asus installed a level shifter/converter HDMI 2.1 chip on this motherboard to enable FRL signals up to 40 or 48 Gbps? Can they answer this question, please?

If the motherboard does not have this enabling chip, Asus must remove "HDMI 2.1 (4K/60)" from marketing, as such claim would be meaningless and misleading the public. Whoever has this motherboard, please challenge them to provide with the evidence that this port can operate FRL protocol and deliver images with bandwidth above 18 Gbps.