Final Words & Conclusion
Conclusion
The B550 Aorus Pro is an interesting offer in the sense that it performs just as well as X570. The dynamic is weird though, typically the B series where value boards, B550 however is the new mainstream, and unfortunately is priced like that. It is, however, a very complete board offering one full speed M2 slot at Gen4.0, then one at Gen 3.0 as well as a full PCIe gen 4.0 slot with 16 lanes for graphics and then the rest is Gen 3.0. That's fine really. Performance-wise the board managed to impress me all the way. I mean the performance among X570 and B550 is simply put the same with minor differences here and there. For B550 typically a lot of features are stripped away, and with some clever tweaks, Gigabyte managed to put 2x M2 on there, 2.5 Gbps ethernet. Unfortunately, it lacks WIFI6 with AX and Bluetooth, which at 179 USD is a bit of a thing that I am missing. There is proper support for OCing and support for the highest clocked DDR4 modules at 5400 MHz (!) (not that we'd recommend you that price-wise). All the features make this board really nice, the motherboard also got a bump upwards with a 2.5G Ethernet jack. Then the VRM design is more than sufficient, even with a 12-core 3900XT under the AIDA FPU stress load for long-duration temps sat only at 5 5 Degrees C, so that's just not an issue.
DDR4 Memory
Memory compatibility should not and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs. I'll keep repeating this, but there are some really good Ryzen optimized kits out there. With Ryzen Generation 3 you can go higher in DDR4 clock frequency if you want to. We advise that up-to 3600 MHz, CL16 is fine, after that frequency value a 2:1 divider kicks in, and that can have an effect on the Infinity Fabric bandwidth, inter-core CCX bandwidth. We see no reason for faster DDR4 memory anyways, it's expensive and does not bring in added perf, much like what you see on Intel platforms as well.
Power consumption
With Ryzen 3000 processors now fabbed at 7nm, you may see some interesting energy efficiency. now we used a 12 core 3900XT on B550 which is a little excessive I agree. The load values are excellent. The 3900XT on B550 showed ~60 Watts idle load, ergo read my previous statement on the motherboard. The load values with 12 cores stressed topped 225 Watts (entire PC). So yeah, it's all good there.
Performance & tweaking
Your motherboard will not be a restriction for tweaking and overclocking, the processors and ASIC quality alongside cooling these days are the more important factor. The original Ryzen series from 2017 revealed clocks in the 3900~4000 MHz range on all cores. For Ryzen 2000 / Zen+ that was a notch higher. Ryzen 3000 seems to take an all-core clock of 4300~4400 MHz at best. Ryzen 7 3700X was able to reach a stable 4400 MHz, but that was on proper liquid cooling and really absolutely the maximum. If you tweak to the maximum, likely 1.425v~1.450v is needed for a stable 4.3 GHz on all cores. The thing is, and I have been thinking about this for a long time, I would not recommend overclocking and tweaking. These processors by themselves can boost 1 or 2 cores to 4500, 4600, and, on the 16-core part, even 4.7 GHz. So while the rest of the cores will be binned slower, that's where you get your extra game performance. The positives of an all-core 4400 Mhz would not outweigh the positives of the default high Turbo clocks. It is something to think about for sure. At least you can try and see what works best for you. But the binned clock recipe that AMD has applied to the processors at default likely will work out the best in most scenarios, including power consumption. This is going to be a generic and general consensus for all many-core processors really.
Final words
Gigabyte offers a nice B550 motherboard with the Aorus Pro. I just wish the B550 series overall would be a notch cheaper. My gut feeling tells me that if this board would be priced 150 SUD< it would have been a hit. I mean, decent features, good looks, proper performance and satisfactory VRM, but it is just that. The audio is Realtek 1220 based backed with WIMA capacitors. Next to that, you'll have an abundance of USB 3.2 connectivity at your disposal making this board really feature-rich. Of course, the VRM design is majestic, even after 15 minutes of 100% load on a 12-core processor I could place my hand on the VRM heatsink, it remains luke-warm. The overall performance is in line with X570, and memory support is great. With B550 AMD still allowed partial PCIe Gen 4.0 support on one M2 slot and your graphics card (x16 lanes), which is great to see. In closing I can keep things simple, this is your normal mainstream motherboard that will tick all the boxes you need to build even a powerful PC. Compared to X570 the differences are harder to spot compared to previous generations. Its feature set is more than sufficient for all your needs. If pricing would come down a bit, it would be a very recommended product as other then pricing it's delivering on all fronts.
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