AMD’s new budget B550 motherboards will bring PCIe 4.0 to the masses. That means considerably faster SSDs and better I/O support on even the cheapest of motherboards. At first, there were some concerns over the pricing of the new B550 boards due to the inclusion of PCIe 4.0 which requires more PCB layers than PCIe 3.0, but I can now confirm that they’ll be as cheap as existing B450 boards. In this post, I’ll be sharing the price-tags of Gigabyte’s entire B550 motherboard lineup, and guess what’s the starting point. It goes as low as $94!
The Gigabyte B550 DS3H will sell for just $94, despite featuring a decent setup. You get a 5+3 phase VRM, PCIe 4.0, dual M.2 slots, and DDR4-4000MT/s support for less than $100. Granted, it’s not the best board you’ll find on the market, but considering the feature-set and the accompanying $94 price-tag, it’s pretty sweet.
Climbing up the ladder, you’ve got the B550 AORUS PRO for $129. This one comes with a 10+3 phase (using doublers). In addition to PCIe 4.0 and dual-M.2 support, it comes with one USB 3.2 (Type C), one 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, five USB 3.2 Gen 1 and eight USB 2.0 ports.
At the higher end of the spectrum, you’ve got the B550 Aorus Master with a 14+2 phase Digital VRM (in reality it’s just a 7 phase, but that’s pretty good too) and 6 PCB layers. It has seven USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, one USB 3.2 Type C, and ten USB 2.0 ports. There are three PCIe M.2 slots, three PCIe x16 slots (PCIe 4.0 only on the primary one) for 3-way CrossfireX and support for as much as 128GB of DDR4-5400 memory!
It not only has a dual-BIOS but double the BIOS chip size as normal B550 boards: two 32MB BIOS chips instead of one, an extra for backup. You can view the entire lineup here.
