six years six years ago was the last
time I did an unboxing video of a
motherboard but quite frankly it's also been six years since I've had anything
that I'm this excited about a su
sponsored this unboxing of a handful of there be 550 motherboards and guys be
550 is basically going to be the way to
go for well until AMD bestows upon us
something with even more value than this which honestly seems kind of far-fetched
at this point let's start with the tough gaming be 550 M plus Wi-Fi which is
where I think a lot of B 550 buyers are gonna end up because it is quite the
sweet spot in terms of value accessories
wise you got your Wi-Fi antenna you got
your SATA cable IO shield M 2 screws
nothing exciting there let's focus on
the motherboard itself starting with the m4 socket AMD has done a great job of
upholding their commitment to support this socket on a long-term basis almost
to the detriment of their be 550 chipset products because one of the main
differentiators between B 450 which was
their last generation mainstream socket and B 550 was supposed to be support for
the upcoming fourth generation rising processors based on there's n3
architecture but then they backtracked and assuming that your motherboard
manufacturer decides to add bio support for those tips you will actually be able
to use them which kind of raises the question why bother with B 550 in the
first place and why does Linus think that this is so important the reason is
that B 550 takes almost everything that
I would have cared about in an x5 70 board and ports it down to a lower price
point and no requirement for active cooling for the chipset so what we're
looking at here is PCI Express Gen 4 link so that's double the bandwidth of
PCI Express gen3 between the CPU and the primary PCI
Express 69 graphic slot as well as one MDOT two
slot so you're gonna be able to take advantage of double the bandwidth of PCI
Express gen3 for both your graphics card and your
main storage drive that you've got your OS on for years to come
the other key is that within the constraints of the power delivery design
that your motherboard manufacturer implements there's no limitations on B
550 in terms of overclocking either of the CPU or of the memory and this is
something that I shouldn't have to bring up as a feature except that Intel
recently locked down memory overclocking
on some of their SKUs so that you can't
get the full potential performance out of those chips a very unfortunate
situation to illustrate the next big feature I
actually need a different board this is the B 550 ii from ASUS rog Strix lineup
sorry B 550 e gaming because it's for
gamers and this puppy right here has got
official support not just for AMD crossfire but also NVIDIA sli which is
something that we haven't seen before on AMD's mainstream rise and chipsets
because NVIDIA requires four sli certification that the 16x slot can be
split into an 8 X 8 X rather than having
a 16 X and a 4 X or an 8 X and a 4x as
AMD allows for crossfire support but
Linus you might say surely there's got to be some downside and there is x5 70
which is AMD's higher-tier chipset from this generation has a PCI Express Gen 4
by 4 link between the CPU and the chipset so what that means is that Gen 4
devices can be hooked up through the chipset and communicate with the CPU
that way that's how X 570 boards can have so many and got two slots on them
for example and it also means just generally more bandwidth and more
flexibility for motherboard manufacturers when it comes to adding
additional features to their boards so that's why you're gonna see even a high
end B 550 board like this one equipped
with only 2 m2 slots one of which is running at Gen 3 speeds
and things like look at that we've got a
ton of USB 2.0 ports on the back of the
i/o plate here like what's the deal with that well the deal with that is that a
gen 3 by 4 link is just not that fast so if you want to add features like in the
case of the ROG Strix boards Intel two-and-a-half gigabit networking or in
the case of the tough boards Realtek two and a half gig networking well
something's got to give because the users going to notice if you go and pile
on a whole bunch of onboard features that if they actually go and use all at
the same time you end up with a big nasty bottleneck between the chipset and
the CPU socket none of this is the end of the world but it does mean that
motherboard manufacturers have to make choices so on this B 550 board for
example ASUS was able to cram more USB 5
gigabit per second ports onto the back panel but look at this they had to give
up having one of those fancy newfangled USB 3.1 gen2 front panel connectors so
if you have a case that has front panel type C you're gonna have to go with
something more like the B 550 e gaming little things like that and now that
this one has got 2 USB 3 internal
headers oh boy well that's why your back panel is full of USB 2.0 ports even this
type see over here by the way is apparently an audio optimized USB 2 so I
guess there's just like you know it's like a cleaner circuit board or
something like that that's something I have not actually seen before to be clear I'm not too
worried about any of that though most of what most of you guys need the gamers
and content creators out there is high speed connections between your CPU and
your memory your graphics card and your storage and B 450 takes care of all of
that and if you really needed some more USB ports it's not like you can't throw
a USB add-in card into one of the PCI Express slots that's available on your
board so really for me this comes down to which B 550 motherboard to go for
what's the right balance of you know internal headers vs. rear connectors in
order for you to be able to plug in everything that you need to do you care
about something like you know more robust VRMs like you might find on a
Strix board versus a or a tough board do you care about all
the extra RGB headers this one has 4 RGB headers two of them are 12 volt
two of them are 5 volt addressable how important is that to you that's totally
on you but for me B 550 is a totally
exciting chipset for what is an exciting generation of chips now and an even more
exciting one with Zen three-course just around the
corner so thanks again to asu's for sponsoring this video you can find links
to their whole be 550 lineup which is quite extensive they've got freaking ton
of boards you know I didn't even I even get to one of these this is the B 550 F
gaming so this is slightly lower end you've got no SLI support compared to
the E and I think it drops like that that type C compatible internal
connector or something like that that seems to be most of the difference I
think might have one fewer RGB connector or something like that so you can check
that out at the link below thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe