Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master review - Introduction

Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master review
Meet your MASTER

Finally, B550 Chipset based motherboards are here. We start off with a very premium B550 Aorus Master, loaded with 2.5 GigE Ethernet, AX WIFI6 and three M2 NVMe slots we wonder if this awesome motherboard even belongs in the B series. All Ryzen Gen processors are supported on this board, it's about performance and aesthetics, heck even the CPU socket has a metal reinforced dual 8/4-pin connectors. The dual pin connectors already indicate a strong VRM, and this motherboard as such has 14+2 phases backed by 70A power stages. Gigabyte applies a familiar dark/grey shielded design, optimized for cooling, and armed with a proper feature set build around 14 power stages purely for that Ryzen processor. It also has and has nice hidden M2 slots, three of them. The motherboard has been fitted with the usual suspects and then some, including a 2.5 Gigabit (Realtek) ethernet and then WIFI6 in the form of AX. When it comes to audio you will run into an ALC 1220 Codec from Realtek, paired with WIMA FKP2 studio-grade audio capacitors.

So what is B550? Well, believe it or not, the B series typically are business (quick add-in) motherboards, or for consumer, we refer to it as the B for budget. Alongside the Ryzen 3 3000 series, there is X570, and now a B550 chipset for socket AM4 processors. PCI Gen 4.0 still is applied to the x16 slot and one M2 slot (the processor provides it (you need a Ryzen 3000 processor for PCIe Gen 4.0, older procs will offer PCIe Gen 3.0). The B550 chipset and DMI uplink otherwise are all PCIe Gen 3.0. 

Next to the dedicated x4 lanes for a single M.2. SSD, the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master will split up the x16 PCIe Gen 4.0 graphics slot into a single 8x connection, that frees 2x four lanes. So any graphics card would run 8 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0 and then all of a sudden you can use three m.2. SSDs at Gen 4.0.  The motherboard has reinforced RAM slots and the top PCIe slot is reinforced as well. Little about the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master can be referred to as 'budget' though, as this easily could be a premium flagship motherboard due to its features and a $279 USD price tag.

The board as stated is positioned in an enthusiast region of what is considered the mainstream segment, it does look properly AORUS styled, stuff we like of course. Also, the new board has some interesting new features Have a peek, and then let's head onwards into the review my man.