'ASRock's B550AM-Gaming Motherboard Features PCI-Express 4.0 & Beefy VRMs' - Tom's

UsandThem

Elite Member
May 4, 2000
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https://www.tomshardware.com/news/b550am-gaming-motherboard-features
Where things get a little confusing is that at that time, the B550A chipset was said by AMD's Robert Hallock to be a rehash of the B450 chipsets but for OEMs, only featuring PCI-Express 3.0. The specifications we found now, however, point to the motherboard having PCI-Express 4.0 on all fronts. Therefore, it's possible there may be only one B550 chipset, and that the "B550A is for OEMs" argument was meant to throw the community off.
Whereas the X570 motherboards have PCI-Express switching that brings PCI-Express 4.0 lanes to all the PCI-E slots, and can split them across multiple slots if necessary, the B550AM Gaming from ASRock only delivers PCI-Express 4.0 support on the uppermost slot and to the M.2 slot.
Hopefully the pricing on these new motherboards will be a lot more reasonable than the X570 series were when they launched. The B550 chipset seems to have just about everything most people would want as far as PCIe 4.0 (namely one 16X slot and M.2).
 

Newbian

Lifer
Aug 24, 2008
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The biggest question is will they have the horrible chipset fans the x570's suffered from mostly?
 

ao_ika_red

Golden Member
Aug 11, 2016
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The biggest question is will they have the horrible chipset fans the x570's suffered from mostly?
Of course not because this chipset is derived from B450 not X570 hence B550A has limited PCIe 4.0 support and it's from CPU itself.
 

PingSpike

Lifer
Feb 25, 2004
21,730
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We'll see what this is, but it certainly sounds like this is just a b450 chipset with validated-to-work cpu driven pci-e slots.

To me the biggest advantage of PCIE4.0 isn't on the GPU or the m.2 slot, since I don't own any PCIE4.0 equipment and probably won't for some time. What I liked was double the bandwidth for the chipset link so that everything coming off that wasn't so constrained. This would probably lack that feature if its just a B450.