Going beyond a standard feature set with WiFi, 2.5 Gb/s LAN, and an integrated I/O shield, the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming is a great mid-range B550 board. When it comes to looks, the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming has that classic STRIX aesthetic featuring a great RGB implementation as well as a design that is mostly neutral, with a flair of red and white accents.

Out of the box, performance was excellent for the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming. Memory overclocking was good as well, as I reached 4066 MHz CL16 stable with my Trident Z Neo kit. While the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming was not able to pass stability testing at 3600 MHz CL14, it did manage to boot into Windows. For CPU overclocking, I was able to achieve 4.4 GHz on all cores, which matches the other B550 boards I have tested.

While the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming does technically use a 4-phase Vcore VRM, ASUS is using their "Teamed" power stage design. In this case, there are three 50 A power stages from Vishay for every phase. While on paper, the low phase count may not paint the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming in the best light, the fact is that the B550-F achieved the same CPU overclocks as the other B550 boards I have tested. Additionally, VRM thermals were very good, barely exceeding 60 °C during even my VRM torture testing. ASUS has a lot of experience with this style of VRM design and knows how to design around any potential drawbacks.

So the final question is whether you should buy a high-end B550 motherboard or a low-end X570 motherboard. For a price similar to this motherboard, you can get one of several pretty decent entry-level X570 boards. The ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming offers more modern features, such as 2.5 Gb/s LAN and WiFi 6, at the cost of more than one PCIe 4.0 x16 and PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot each. I think for most users, the newer features will win out. There is little to be gained in real-world performance from PCIe 4.0 right now, and most users still will not need more than their GPU and one PCIe 4.0 capable NVMe SSD, even after the storage and GPU markets have caught up.

The ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming is a well-rounded board with a solid feature set and competitive pricing. It may seem odd to think of an AMD "B" series motherboard as mainstream, but that is exactly what the STRIX B550-F Gaming is: a fully featured mainstream motherboard.
If you are in the market for an AM4 motherboard that doesn't break the bank, the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming should be at the top of your list.