The AMD B550 Motherboard Overview: ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, ASRock, and Others
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on June 16, 2020 11:00 AM ESTASRock B550 Steel Legend
The Steel Legend series of motherboards has been around for a couple of generations now, focusing more on an aesthetic more towards white and greys, as if the motherboards themselves were using stainless steel on the heatsinks. The B550 Steel Legend in this case uses heatsinks on the power delivery but they do not have a heatpipe at this price point, but we do get some extended M.2 armor from the chipset. The motherboard PCB looks very busy in this styling.
There is some RGB LEDs, on the rear panel cover and on the chipset, and there are two RGB headers on the board in the top right and bottom middle. The socket area has access to five 4-pin headers in easy reach, and like the B550 Taichi, we have four DDR4 slots with single sided latches.
On the right hand side of the board is a USB 3.0 header, a Type-C header, six SATA ports from the chipset, and a two-digit debug. On the bottom there are more fan headers, two USB 2.0 headers, and pads where power/reset buttons should be, perhaps on a different variant of this motherboard.
The B550 Steel Legend only has a single main PCIe 4.0 x16 slot from the CPU, with additional reinforcement, and there is an additional PCIe 3.0 x4 slot from the chipset. The audio for this board is beefed up, with the Realtek ALC1220 codec being paired with an NE5532 amp. The M.2 slots on this board are for one PCIe 4.0 x4 drive and one PCIe 3.0 x2 drive – there is an additional M.2 Wi-Fi slot in the middle.
From left to right, on the rear panel we get a DisplayPort, HDMI, a combination PS/2 port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports in blue, four USB 2.0 ports, a Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, a Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, a Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5 gigabit Ethernet port, spaces for the Wi-Fi antenna, and the audio jacks.
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Lucky Stripes 99 - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
I've read elsewhere that Zen1 processors supposedly had a 128 Mb address limit for UEFI firmware. It sounds suspect, but looking back at early AM4 boards, I don't recall any with either 256 Mb chips or striped 128 Mb chips, so maybe it wasn't simply due to the significant jump in price for 256 Mb chips over 128 Mb ones.Redstorm - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Likewise, looking to replace my aging 7 year old HTPC with a mATX B550 and a Ryzen 4700G but radio silence from AMD on releasing compatiable APU's for the B550's, We now have the long overdue Budget motherboards but no APU's. Dissapointed.alufan - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
I understand the frustration however if your buying a Budget Board then surely a budget CPU is the best fit, also new APUs are inbound according to all the rumours, meanwhile your older APU will fit just fine I believe, I expect the new APUs will have Navi cores as per the Xbox and PS5 but of course they probably cannot be released until the new Navi cards and consoles are out, think about it though what a sea chamge folks are now waiting eagerly for a new release from AMD because they know it will kick ass not close the gap to Intel, its a good time to be a customer!Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
Older APUs aren't supported on B550DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
I think you forgot something... :-)Fortunately, this component is a unique motherboard among B550 and well worth reading up on [add link].
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Interesting that the GIGABYTE B550 Vision D board's Type-C ports don't have the Thunderbolt logo next to them. I wonder if Intel won't all the logo to be use on AMD systems.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
*allowDigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
"Although on paper, there isn't much difference between B450 and B550 with slightly more SATA available due to the removable of eSATA support, both remain PCIe 3.0 bound."The B450 only had PCIe 2.0 lanes. Huge difference from the B550 IMO
Lucky Stripes 99 - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Agreed. That's going to make a huge difference for boards with secondary or tertiary M.2 or U.2 ports that hangs off the chipset. That goes double if they only get 2 PCIe lanes instead of the full 4.a5cent - Friday, June 19, 2020 - link
Yup, exactly what I thought.Equally "BIG" is that B550 finally has more PCIe lanes, so adding more NVMe drives doesn't require downgrading other ports like it always did on B450.
B450 was a firmware upgrade for the budget B350 chipset. B550 is the first time this tier of AMD chipset doesn't suck.