Gigabyte B550 Vision D review

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Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

The Gigabyte B550 Vision D certainly is an appealing product. It's one of the best-looking B550 models on the market. For RGB lovers, there are two addressable and two regular LED strip headers, and one CPU cooler LED strip header, with nice access to eight 4-pin headers overall.  The DDR4 slots support up to 128 GB of memory, and even ECC is possible here. This motherboard also handles up to DDR4-5400 memory, which is impressive. The Gigabyte B550 Vision D has only a single main PCIe 4.0 x16 slot supported by the processor, and there is an extra PCIe 3.0 x4 slot provided by the chipset. The audio for this board does look nice, with the Realtek ALC1220 codec paired with a NE5532 amp. The M.2 slots support one PCIe 4.0 x4 drive and one PCIe 3.0 x2 drive. Overall, the B550 really is an optimal chipset for the Ryzen processor for most users. The price of the Gigabyte B550 Vision D is about 260 USD, which makes it very expensive, and in the range of some nice X570 motherboards. It has robust 12+2 power delivery, with the inclusion of an Intel Titan Ridge controller for dual USB 3.2 G2 Type-C ports. One of the things that could have been better is the Ethernet controller: 2.5 Gbps would be nicer than two gigabit ports (from Intel, not Realtek by the way). On the other hand, you get AX200 from Intel, which does perform well. Another nice feature is the PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, for your older peripherals.


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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’d say that up to 3600 MHz CL16 is fine. If you go beyond this value, a 2:1 divider kicks in (but you can achieve even 3733 or 3800 MHz with a bit of effort and/or luck). This, in turn, may affect Infinity Fabric bandwidth and inter-core CCX bandwidth. We see no reason for faster DDR4 memory anyways. It's expensive and does not bring in added perf, as you can see in our Ryzen RAM gaming test. It’s better to have 4 banks occupied with double-sided memory.

Power consumption

With Ryzen 3000 processors now fabbed in 7nm, you may see some interesting energy efficiency. We used an 8-core 3700X with this B550, which is really adequate. The load values are excellent.

Performance & tweaking

This motherboard will not be a restriction for tweaking and overclocking. Processor and ASIC quality, alongside cooling, are the more important factors these days. The original Ryzen products from 2017 offered clocks in the 3900~4000 MHz range on all cores. Then, Ryzen 2000 / Zen+ brought it up a notch. Finally, Ryzen 3000 seems to handle an all-core clock of 4300~4400 MHz at best. Our Ryzen 7 3700X was able to reach a stable 4400 MHz, but that was done with proper liquid cooling, and it’s really the absolute maximum. If you tweak to the limit, 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 at all. These processors can boost 1 or 2 cores to 4500 or 4600 (even 4.7 GHz for the 16-core model). So, while the rest of the cores will be binned slower, that's where you get your extra gaming performance. The positives of an all-core 4400 Mhz overclock would not outweigh the positives of the default high Turbo clocks. It is something to think about for sure. At the very least, you can try and see what works best for you. However, the binned clock recipe that AMD has applied to these processors by default will likely work best in most aspects, and this includes power consumption as well. This is going to be a generic and general consensus for all multi-core processors really. 


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Final words

With the B550 chipset, you get a single PCIe 4.0 for graphics, one M.2 slot, and overclocking ability. This should be enough for the majority of consumers. X570 is not worth the price premium for this user base. We also need to emphasize that B450 motherboards were significantly cheaper but, on the other hand, most B550 products are really fine, also in the VRM department. The Gigabyte B550 Vision D should handle even the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X. The price is about 260 USD, so a lot for a B-series chipset, but you get two 1 Gbps ethernet ports, AX200 Wi-Fi, 14-phase power (although this is present in most of Gigabyte’s B550 line-up), nice audio performance, 4 SATA ports (usually it’s 6). This is a great motherboard that is very classy (and you still get two regular and two addressable RGB headers for the bling), but the price is not right, as it’s in the range of X570 products. You can choose this MoBo if you need Thunderbolt 3, or maybe the PS/2 keyboard/mouse port for older peripherals, too? The AX200 Wi-Fi is a nice bonus but I think it’s not decisive. Well, maybe really only content creators will choose this product after all. Other users will probably pick cheaper solutions. The Gigabyte B550 Vision D surely deserves the Recommended award for all that it delivers, but you need to remember the 260 USD price tag, which will limit the sales. For the next revision/model, it would be good to implement 2.5 Gbps ethernet. Other than that and the price, we got no other major complaints.

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