Gigabyte B550M AORUS Pro

[Black Haru]

The Gigabyte B550M AORUS Pro promises a pragmatic feature set at a sensible price. A 10+3 VRM design, Q-Flash Plus, and a formidable VRM thermal solution along with a healthy portioning of storage options could make the B550M AORUS Pro the perfect budget B550 motherboard.

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[TheinsanegamerN]

WHY do comapnies keep slapping fugly hunks of metal on their heatsinks if they are going to throttle anyway? There is absolutely no reason a 10 phase VRM shoudl throttle OCing the likes of a 5900/5950x. 8 phase motherboards can do this without issue.

Be interested to see what would happen if someone were to rip that hideous hunk of garbage off the board and put on proper copper heatsinks. I bet it'd run way cooler.

Also dislike the PCIe layout. MSI manages to have the M.2 above the first PCIe slot but also puts the first slot where it should be on the B550 mortar, allowing you to have two expansion cards in addition to the GPU.

 

[bob3002]

Couple of typos I noticed, first page says ATX instead of micro-ATX in the specs table, and third page says 6 SATA ports below the picture of 4.

The VRM temperatures were for overclocking with no forced airflow. I assume they'd drop a decent amount with either a tower cooler or inside a case with decent airflow?

 

[Caring1]

Definitely needs active VRM cooling.

 

[dicobalt]

I have this board and it has worked flawless for me with a 5600X. Q-flash Plus worked great to update bios for Ryzen 5000 support, no CPU or RAM installed. Easily enabled XMP on some Hynix 3600 CL16, no problem with 4 passes of memtest86. All core Cinebench R23 can't get the CPU over 68C in 26C ambient with 70% humidity, using a dual CPU fan cheap Hyper 212 heatsink in a mesh front 5 silent 16db case fan Cooler Master NR600 case. BTW the second CPU fan does a good job of cooling the VRM heatsink. I highly recommend this board to budget buyers. If you're going to put a 5900 in this board, or an AIO then you're not a budget buyer. Also i'd like to thank Gigabyte for labeling the + and - pins inside the front panel header, it's a small detail but one of those annoying little things that's often overlooked.

 

[Gmr_Chick]

Haru, great review. One question though: there's also a PRO-P version of this board, but what are the differences between it and the regular PRO model reviewed here?

 

[Caring1]

Haru, great review. One question though: there's also a PRO-P version of this board, but what are the differences between it and the regular PRO model reviewed here?

It's the m-ATX version.
I'm wondering now that I have looked what the difference is between the V2 version and this.

 

[mechtech]

I find sata 3 pretty sad and long in the tooth. It’s outdone by USB 3.1c. One would have thought sata 4-1200 would have been out years ago.

Any plans to test on-board network chips in the future?

 

[Dammeron]

Gigabyte made a weird choice of not putting USB C front header on any of the B550 boards - even the "Master" version doesn't have one.

If they made some proper VRM cooling (with fins, instead of just a chunk of alloy) and added USB C and wifi this would be a great MB.

Also dislike the PCIe layout. MSI manages to have the M.2 above the first PCIe slot but also puts the first slot where it should be on the B550 mortar, allowing you to have two expansion cards in addition to the GPU.

Mortar has more features and a little bit better board layout than this one, however the amount of USB ports in the back I/O is laughable. Also - why put wifi antenna connectors on the bottom of the I/O? That way antennas get in the way of all the other plugs You stick in the back.

 

[Buftor]

Haru, great review. One question though: there's also a PRO-P version of this board, but what are the differences between it and the regular PRO model reviewed here?

They are both mATX size. The Pro-P has better VRM (DrMOS) and 2.5G ethernet. I wish the Pro-P was reviewed instead, the original Pro is already discounted (maybe discontinued?)

 

[InVasMani]

Something I'm a little curious about could you put the GPU in the PCIE 3.0 slot and use the 4.0 slot for a quad M.2 x16 card and raid it with the PCIE 4.0 CPU wired slot!?

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

I find sata 3 pretty sad and long in the tooth. It’s outdone by USB 3.1c. One would have thought sata 4-1200 would have been out years ago.

Any plans to test on-board network chips in the future?

USB 3.1C adds significant CPU overhead though.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I find sata 3 pretty sad and long in the tooth. It’s outdone by USB 3.1c. One would have thought sata 4-1200 would have been out years ago.

Any plans to test on-board network chips in the future?

I mean, comparing usb 3.1 to sata II is like comparing firewire to IDE. Firewire was superior, but it was never meant as an IDE replacement. Same with USB. Therre were two replacements for SATA, SATA express and U.2, neither caught on. With newer programs taking advantage of SSDs there is always the possibility of one of those coming back from the dead though as SATA IV, but consumers would need to demand it, and given how many consumers still buy HDDs, we are far from actually needing that bandwidth.

 

[olstyle]

Something I'm a little curious about could you put the GPU in the PCIE 3.0 slot and use the 4.0 slot for a quad M.2 x16 card and raid it with the PCIE 4.0 CPU wired slot!?

Bifurcation is enabled on B550 so it could work.

 

[InVasMani]

Good to know if the Ryzen 3300X chips were actually availible at retail pricing it might even make a bit of sense. The x570 seems like it offers a lot of additional potential though with the extra x16 PCIE 4.0 lanes and could drop the GPU into the x4 slot. I'd have to compare the B550/X570 price differences whenever the Ryzen 3300X prices normalize. I was just considering NVME with raid would be lot of fun and don't mind the idea of sacrificing some GPU bandwidth anywhere from x4 to x16 slot on PCIE 3.0/4.0 looks like it would be alright for quite some time with minimal performance drop off. I think with the X570 you can potentially raid together 8 NVME PCIE 4.0 drives together if you shuffle that GPU into a weaker x4 slot which is quite wild that storage would be ripping.

 

[olstyle]

If you don't want to go for a big CPU and don't care for the GPU a 4xxxG or 3xxxG would be a better CPU choice. If you do care about GPU performance sacrificing it for NVME Raid makes no sense.
I would have personally liked to have a board like the one tested here, but the B550 was just way to late.

 

[Mouth of Sauron]

...consumers would need to demand it, and given how many consumers still buy HDDs, we are far from actually needing that bandwidth.

We, the consumers, need lots of hdd space for porn!

On more serious note, I have 20Tb in hdds, and feel a mighty need for more... That is also why I won't consider this MB for future update - only 4 sata...

But yeah, I would like to have money for 20-30Tb in M.2 or something - ssds even - but that is not the case...

(before someone mentions NAS, I swore to the Dark Lord never to use one again)