AMD B550 Motherboard First Look & VRM Temperature Test

[Julio Franco]

At long last AMD more budget-oriented B550 motherboards will finally go on sale. There's been plenty of talk about the B550 chipset and all the supporting boards for weeks, and we're now able to share our results with you. On hand for testing today we have the MSI B550M Mortar, MSI B550 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro and Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2044-amd-b550-motherboard-vrm/

 

[neeyik]

Looks like motherboard manufacturers are finally realising that you just can't cobble together any product and state it will support any CPU. MSI clearly learnt this lesson the hard way.

 

[LeroN]

Imho but a combo like i5-10400F + Gigabyte B460M DS3H + any cheap 16Gb 2666-3000 RAM for $60 looks better as an inexpensive and solid budget solution compared with R3600 + B550 + 16Gb 3200 RAM for a higher price.
PCIe 4 is a doubtful feature because as we could see it doesn't bring any profit to 2800Ti and such performance is close to middle-end GPUs after 3-4 years. Even then we wouldn't have some advantage there.
Almost B550 mobos have cheap old Realtek audio and NIC chips only the most expensive ones.
Another thing is having more m2 slots if we overpay for AMD in a long term conditions but unfortunately we stay in the same place. It's interesting to see a stagnation there despite on lowering popularity of SATA and the growing market of pretty affordable high capacity m2 SSDs. So a future extension of your storage after 2-3 years is pretty limited and a solution is to buy a PCIe m2 adapter or put your low capacity m2 SSD on a shelf.
Also good luck to sell Zen 2 for a good after the release of Zen 3.
Summarizing all above it looks for me like we're not having any moving forward today and AMD want's significantly more for even less than we had before. There are questionable new "features" and "high quality" imbalanced with high prices.

 

[BSim500]

In the meantime, the new AMD B550 chipset can be viewed as another nail in Intel 10th-gen Core series coffin. The B550 Tomahawk, for example, is slightly cheaper than the Z490 Tomahawk

^ The problem with "B550 competition = X490" is that when comparing actual "like for like" (similar model & brand) - (£115 Asus TUF Gaming Plus Wi-Fi B460M + £160 i5-10400F) ends up cheaper for Intel 6C/12T than (£185 Asus TUF Gaming Plus Wi-Fi B550M + £99 3100) does for AMD 4C/8T, then someone's "jumped the shark" for price setting, as I certainly wouldn't pay more for an 4C/8T on the back of "but you can OC +10%" vs getting a 6C/12T for less minus the OC (just like you previously argued with i3-8350K vs Ryzen 2600...) For those likely to buy mid-range B boards who aren't trying to pump 600 Amps into a LN2 cooler, the "value" of these +80% price increases vs a half decent B450 is being way oversold with B550 + 3100 + "Look at mah overclock!" being an outright ripoff vs B450 + 3600 even at stock.

As a reality check - I work in the electronics industry and here's what the bulk cost of the 4C029N MOSFET's on the Tomahawk board you quoted actually cost per unit direct from the manufacturers site (link). And one for the IR3555 (link). Eye opener, eh? "The reason for the +80% price increase is all down to adding 6x more VRM's plus a few supporting caps & chokes". LOL, no. The reason "Motherboards for Real Gamers (tm)" cost so much is because overlocking has turned into another high margin "Gamer Peripheral / Flagship Smartphone Industry" and we seem to have "evolved" from shoving 2x 366Mhz Celeron's onto an Abit BP6 dual-socket and OCing both +50% to 550MHz for the sake of 2x £10 heatsinks to 'bragging' over paying double the price of motherboards each year for a measly 10%...

 

[Burty117]

Almost B550 mobos have cheap old Realtek audio and NIC chips only the most expensive ones.

I know English isn't your primary language so apologies if I didn't decipher this properly but I can only find one or two B550 Motherboards that have slightly older Audio Implementations on and all of them have at least a 1G NIC with a large majority having 2.5G NIC's on.

Where are you finding these particularly bad B550 Motherboards from?

 

[sorten]

Thanks for the data. I'm a 1080p gamer and my current rig is running on a 7 year old Haswell processor and an NVidia 1660ti. I'm starting to gather info about the B550 boards for a new mAtx build, probably with a Zen 3 CPU.

The price of the B550 boards is surprising, but not a deal breaker for me since I'm more interested in longevity and a potential for CPU upgrades down the road.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Imho but a combo like i5-10400F + Gigabyte B460M DS3H + any cheap 16Gb 2666-3000 RAM for $60 looks better as an inexpensive and solid budget solution compared with R3600 + B550 + 16Gb 3200 RAM for a higher price.

The R5 3600 will be faster at just about everything you need to do and has better upgrade options for the future, so I don't see the point of getting the i5-10400F. The price differences are negligible in all categories, swinging by ~$10 (of course varying widely by region). And if you don't want PCIe4, then get a good B450 Mobo for the 3600 at a notably lower price.

The 10400F really doesn't have much of a use case right now.

 

[Irata]

Summarizing all above it looks for me like we're not having any moving forward today and AMD want's significantly more for even less than we had before. There are questionable new "features" and "high quality" imbalanced with high prices.

I am very curious but where does AMD want significantly more money for „less than we had before” ? Not sure what you are referring to or which parts you are comparing.

 

[Irata]

Looks like motherboard manufacturers are finally realising that you just can't cobble together any product and state it will support any CPU. MSI clearly learnt this lesson the hard way.

Also looks like Motherboard manufacturers are now willing to offer premium AM4 boards, including in the mid range segment. Shows they believe there is a market for this, which is actually good news.

BTW: If you guys could get your hands on an Aorus B550 Vision D to review that would be great.

 

[bluetooth fairy]

My 5 cents add to the list of possible reasons for b550 pricing:
1) mobo makers were told about no Zen3 support on b450, initially;
2) they know something about power appetite of upcoming products, incl. xt-versions and probably Zen3 parts.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Imho but a combo like i5-10400F + Gigabyte B460M DS3H + any cheap 16Gb 2666-3000 RAM for $60 looks better as an inexpensive and solid budget solution compared with R3600 + B550 + 16Gb 3200 RAM for a higher price.
PCIe 4 is a doubtful feature because as we could see it doesn't bring any profit to 2800Ti and such performance is close to middle-end GPUs after 3-4 years. Even then we wouldn't have some advantage there.
Almost B550 mobos have cheap old Realtek audio and NIC chips only the most expensive ones.
Another thing is having more m2 slots if we overpay for AMD in a long term conditions but unfortunately we stay in the same place. It's interesting to see a stagnation there despite on lowering popularity of SATA and the growing market of pretty affordable high capacity m2 SSDs. So a future extension of your storage after 2-3 years is pretty limited and a solution is to buy a PCIe m2 adapter or put your low capacity m2 SSD on a shelf.
Also good luck to sell Zen 2 for a good after the release of Zen 3.
Summarizing all above it looks for me like we're not having any moving forward today and AMD want's significantly more for even less than we had before. There are questionable new "features" and "high quality" imbalanced with high prices.

Why would you compare the 10400F to the 3600, those people would cross shop 3300X and save a fair bit.

 

[loki1944]

Imho but a combo like i5-10400F + Gigabyte B460M DS3H + any cheap 16Gb 2666-3000 RAM for $60 looks better as an inexpensive and solid budget solution compared with R3600 + B550 + 16Gb 3200 RAM for a higher price.
PCIe 4 is a doubtful feature because as we could see it doesn't bring any profit to 2800Ti and such performance is close to middle-end GPUs after 3-4 years. Even then we wouldn't have some advantage there.
Almost B550 mobos have cheap old Realtek audio and NIC chips only the most expensive ones.
Another thing is having more m2 slots if we overpay for AMD in a long term conditions but unfortunately we stay in the same place. It's interesting to see a stagnation there despite on lowering popularity of SATA and the growing market of pretty affordable high capacity m2 SSDs. So a future extension of your storage after 2-3 years is pretty limited and a solution is to buy a PCIe m2 adapter or put your low capacity m2 SSD on a shelf.
Also good luck to sell Zen 2 for a good after the release of Zen 3.
Summarizing all above it looks for me like we're not having any moving forward today and AMD want's significantly more for even less than we had before. There are questionable new "features" and "high quality" imbalanced with high prices.

Well said.

 

[KingDuyTan]

Imho but a combo like i5-10400F + Gigabyte B460M DS3H + any cheap 16Gb 2666-3000 RAM for $60 looks better as an inexpensive and solid budget solution compared with R3600 + B550 + 16Gb 3200 RAM for a higher price.
PCIe 4 is a doubtful feature because as we could see it doesn't bring any profit to 2800Ti and such performance is close to middle-end GPUs after 3-4 years. Even then we wouldn't have some advantage there.
Almost B550 mobos have cheap old Realtek audio and NIC chips only the most expensive ones.
Another thing is having more m2 slots if we overpay for AMD in a long term conditions but unfortunately we stay in the same place. It's interesting to see a stagnation there despite on lowering popularity of SATA and the growing market of pretty affordable high capacity m2 SSDs. So a future extension of your storage after 2-3 years is pretty limited and a solution is to buy a PCIe m2 adapter or put your low capacity m2 SSD on a shelf.
Also good luck to sell Zen 2 for a good after the release of Zen 3.
Summarizing all above it looks for me like we're not having any moving forward today and AMD want's significantly more for even less than we had before. There are questionable new "features" and "high quality" imbalanced with high prices.

Hm... why would anyone pair R5 3600 with the expensive B550 boards though. Good B450 boards like mortar are even cheaper than B460M DS3H while having much better quality, and also have upgrade path to next gen. I think the best selling point of B550 boards like Mortar and Tomahawk in this review are much better VRMs to handle the like of 3900X and 3950X.

 

[SysTor]

I wish you would have tested a couple of B450 boards as well. That would have shown if the B550 is really worth the extra cost.

 

[neeyik]

I wish you would have tested a couple of B450 boards as well. That would have shown if the B550 is really worth the extra cost.

Steve's covered two B450 models here:

 

[Rjmachine]

For a budget rig, I'd buy B450 instead.

B550 is too pricy and ruins the value proposition.

 

[VoxRationes]

With the lack of B450s available in the current market, any new supply of decent motherboards is good. Personally I like the added features that come with the mid-range B550s. For under $200 you get 2 M.2s (1x PCI-E 4.0 / 1x PCI-E 3.0), 2,5 Gb/s LAN, PCI-E 4.0 GPU, Wifi and AC1220 audio. Added to this are VRMs that are more than capable to support the next gen of CPUs while also featuring the next-gen BIOS.

The only true limitation between a x570 and a B550 is the chipset itself. Less 4.0 lanes will not always be a limiting factor, but once cheaper 4.0 hardware rolls out this might be a factor for some people, looking to get the most out of a setup.

With the current CPU prices and the performance they deliver, it might be more reasonable to stay with a sub $200 CPU. Investing an extra $50 in a plattform that could support changes in interfaces for the next couple of generations of GPUs might be a better choice right now unless you run a RTX 2080ti+.

If software goes the way of more multithreading in the future, upgrading to a 4900x or similar will certainly be possible at any point. This could set you up CPU-wise for the next 4-6 years. Sure, DDR5 will come and so will PCI-E 5.0, but look at the number of users that still manage with DDR3 and a 4770K or similar on current GPUs. Processing-power is so high right now with $100 CPUs being able to pump out 4K content within reach of $500 10-core+ CPUs.

With the current market it makes little sense to go B450 unless you are on a strict budget route. For an extra $50 you pick up such a number of features that you would only get in mid-tier $200+ x570 boards. If you want to go low, at $120 you still get all the new interfaces with slightly less features. Sure, if you are looking below $100 there is little left, but I would assume a decent number of boards might breach that barrier in the next months.

 

[MaxSmarties]

But why MSI A-Pro and Gaming Edge performed so bad ???
Temperatures above 100° for expensive motherboards are insane ?
Something is wrong here...

 

[VoxRationes]

But why MSI A-Pro and Gaming Edge performed so bad ???
Temperatures above 100° for expensive motherboards are insane ?
Something is wrong here...

Those motherboards have always performed poorly with temps. Adding to that is a 12-core CPU, a no-airflow test-setup and 1 hour of Blender.

 

[MaxSmarties]

MSI clearly learnt this lesson the hard way.

What do you mean ?

 

[MaxSmarties]

Those motherboards have always performed poorly with temps. Adding to that is a 12-core CPU, a no-airflow test-setup and 1 hour of Blender.

But we are speaking about 115° vs 55° off supposedly lower tier mobos ... how is it possible?
Wasn’t something wrong in the setup ?

 

[neeyik]

What do you mean ?

Steve can explain it better than I can:

 

[MaxSmarties]

Steve can explain it better than I can:

embarrassing....

 

[theruck]

It is always like this with AMD related products it is for 20 years already. they do a product claiming it is as good as the competition then after 2 years they do new product and tell you that the previous one was not so good. it is across their complete product line. the first ryzen was the intel killer on paper then the 2nd gen maybe reached to it. they release new gpu which is nvidia killer but has unusable drivers. it was like that with k2 cpus, athlons, durons... everything. do finally something right at first attempt

 

[MaxSmarties]

It is always like this with AMD related products it is for 20 years already. they do a product claiming it is as good as the competition then after 2 years they do new product and tell you that the previous one was not so good. it is across their complete product line. the first ryzen was the intel killer on paper then the 2nd gen maybe reached to it. they release new gpu which is nvidia killer but has unusable drivers. it was like that with k2 cpus, athlons, durons... everything. do finally something right at first attempt

Well... tbh Ryzen 3000 products actually are better than Intel.