ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi) Overview
The ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi) is an ATX motherboard. ASUS keeps their “Strix” style with this board with an all black PCB with black and red accents. Looking at the board compared to the older Strix B450-F Gaming it looks much more refined.
Starting at the CPU socket we of course have AMD’s AM4 socket. Now as we mentioned B550 motherboards will only support Ryzen 3000 series processors. Surrounding the CPU socket we have the power deliver components and we have a big upgrade here. On the Strix B450-F we only had a 4+4 power phase design, but here we have a 12+2 power phase design. The power delivery components are covered by two large heatsinks.
At the top corner of the board you’ll find an 8-pin EPS connector as well as an optional 4-pin. Moving to the opposite side of the board you’ll find your CPU fan header, optional CPU fan header, and a standard 4-pin RGB header.
Moving over to the memory slots there are four DDR4 DIMM slots which support DDR4 memory all the way up to 4400 MHz. The bottom of the slots don’t lock, which makes swapping out memory once you have a graphics card installed much easier.
Along the edge of the board you have a indication LEDs for Boot, VGA, CPU, and DRAM, a 24-pin ATX power connection, and a USB 3.2 gen 1 header. Coming down the board there are six SATA 6GB/s ports, all of which are controlled by the B550 chipset.
Along the bottom of the board you’ll find the rest of the headers and connections. From left to right you have your front panel audio headers, Thunderbolt header, a 4-pin standard RGB header, 3-pin addressable RGB header, clear CMOS header, thermal sensor connector, 4-pin fan header, two USB 2.0 headers, another 4-pin fan header, and your front panel connections.
The audio section of the board is of course at the bottom left. The entire audio section has complete PCB isolation from the rest of the board. ASUS is making use of their ROG SupremeFX 7.1-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC S1220A. This audio solution features 120dB output and 113dB SNR input, dual OP amplifiers, and impedance sense.
When it comes to expansion slots you have one PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot, one PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot (x4 electrical), and three PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slots. The top PCI-Express slot is metal-reinforced.
There are two M.2 slots on this board and both have M.2 heatsinks, which is nice to see. Both of the slots will support M.2 drives up to 110 mm in both PCIe and SATA modes, but the top slot is the Gen4 slot. The bottom slot is only PCIe 3.0 x4.
Coming over to the rear I/O it has a nice cover on it with the ROG logo on it. This will light up with RGB lighting when you have your system turned on. Like most boards these days this board has a pre-installed I/O shield. When it comes to connections and buttons on the rear I/O we have a BIOS Flashback button, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.2 gen 1 ports, two USB 3.2 gen 2 ports (1x Type-A, 1x Type-C), 2.5Gb Ethernet, two more USB 3.2 gen 1 ports, DisplayPort, HDMI, WiFi antenna connections for the WiFi 6 on the board, and your audio connections.
