Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro review - Introduction

Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro review
Meet the PRO 

B550 Chipset based motherboards are among us, and there are some pretty interesting ones available. We review the B550 Aorus Pro that offers 2.5 GigE Ethernet and two M2 NVMe slots. The board price sits at roughly 179 USD and offers all the defaults you need, and a bit more. 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-pin connectors. For VRM design this motherboard as such has 12+2 phases backed by 50A power stages. Gigabyte applies a familiar dark/grey shielded design, optimized for cooling, and armed with a proper feature set to build around 14 (virtual) power stages purely for that Ryzen processor. It also has and has nice cooled M2 slots, two of them. The motherboard has been fitted with the usual suspects and then some, including a 2.5 Gigabit (Realtek) ethernet but lacks 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 consumers, 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. 

The motherboard has four DIMM slots and the top PCIe slot is reinforced. The board as stated is positioned in mainstream region of what is considered the more affordable 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.