Final Thoughts
So B550 is here and it does give us quite a lot. When X570 launched it was great, but the motherboards were more expensive than what we’ve seen from AMD before. This meant that building a Ryzen 3000 system was very costly. Now with B550 we have less expensive motherboards, but you are still keeping many of the same features you saw on X570. The most important being that you get Gen4 speeds for one PCI-Express slot as well as one M.2 slot. This of course means you can take advantage of super-fast Gen4 NVMe solid state drives.
Another surprising thing about this board is the beefed up VRM. You have a 12+2 power phase design that was more than capable of keeping up with our Ryzen 9 3900X. On top of that we were able to overclock that chip to 4.2 GHz across all 12 cores, which was only 100 MHz lower than what we were able to achieve on X570 motherboards. So you shouldn’t have any issues running and overclocking the higher core count Ryzen 3000 series processors.
ASUS has added a lot of features to make this board very compelling against other B550 motherboards. You have USB 3.2 connectivity, support for memory up to 4400 MHz, 2.5G LAN, and 802.11ax (WiFi 6) WiFi. You have two USB 3.2 gen 2 ports on the rear I/O, which should satisfy most people. Having both WiFi 6 and 2.5G LAN is a plus too, so no matter if you are going wireless or plugging in you are going to have excellent speeds.
ASUS’s BIOS is very easy to navigate and has not changed that much in the past few generations of motherboards. On the software side the Armory Crate is great, especially for beginners. I really wish ASUS would either come out with a new version of Ai Suite or bake it into the Armory Crate somehow because Ai Suite III just seems super dated at this point.
I think for someone running a single graphics card and who is ok with only one Gen4 M.2 drive this is a very solid board. The RGB has been cut down on this board (only on the rear I/O cover), some might like this others of course want their RGB (you do get three headers). Right now this board is selling at our favorite online retailer for $209.99, now if you don’t need WiFi the non-WiFi version is only $189.99. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi) Motherboard a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Can handle high core-count Ryzen 3000 series processors
– Gen4 PCIe slot and M.2 slot
– USB 3.2 gen 2 ports
– M.2 heatsinks on both M.2 slots
– WiFi 6 and 2.5G LAN
– Easy to navigate BIOS
Cons:
– Doesn’t seem like a lot of RGB for an ROG board
– Ai Suite III seems dated
