AMD B550 Specifications and Details

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 09/24/2019 08:51 AM | source: | 20 comment(s)

Many who made the move towards a Ryzen 3000 processor, also treated themselves with an X570 motherboard for PCIe Gen 4.0 and AX WIFI. Other went towards a more affordable X470 motherboard. So one chipset series that has been missing is the affordable B550, until now.

In a nutshell, the B550 chipset is close, very close towards X470. Meaning PCIe Gen 3.0 is the biggest change compared to X570. That also means the interlink between the chipset and CPU is running over four Gen 3 lanes. The good news is that with four extra Gen 4 lanes from the CPU, you can still opt to go with an M2 PCIe 4.0 slot. The rest, incl videocards thus is gen 3.0. But let's compare the two:

Chipset	End-user	USB 3.2 Gen 2	USB 2.0	SATA3	Interconnect	OC Support
B550	Mainstream	2	6	4+4	x4 Gen3	Yes
X570	Enthusiast	8	4	4+8	x4 Gen4	Yes

So compared to the top-end X570, it offers fewer USB 3.2 Gen2 (10 Gb/s) ports, does not support PCI Express 4.0, and communicates with the Ryzen processor via four PCI-E 3.0 lines (instead of PCI-E 4.0), which limits the total bandwidth controllers built into it. That said, that's pretty much it though. Well, that and likely pricing.

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AlmondMan
Senior Member

Posts: 502
Joined: 2007-09-03

#5713943 Posted on: 09/24/2019 09:13 AM

Pretty nice to see

Expand the platform, grow support. It's actually interesting to be in to hardware again for the first time in many, many years. Actually doing analysis on requirements, software support, use cases and such instead of just going "We're going with Intel". So fun, challenging and exciting! Good times!

sverek
Senior Member

Posts: 5886
Joined: 2011-01-02

#5713946 Posted on: 09/24/2019 09:34 AM

Patient consumers win, as usual.

Exodite
Senior Member

Posts: 1931
Joined: 2006-09-28

#5713950 Posted on: 09/24/2019 10:03 AM

With PCIe4 off the table it's kinda hard to imagine why you'd pick up a B550 board over a B450 one, unless the former are very competitively priced.

Hilbert hit the distinguishing feature on the head I think, you could potentially get PCIe4-enabled lanes from the CPU still - though I struggle to see how that would keep pricing in check and thus be worth it vs. B450. We'll see I guess, this just feels kinda shrug-worthy to me.

Evildead666
Senior Member

Posts: 1284
Joined: 2003-09-14

#5713954 Posted on: 09/24/2019 10:10 AM

OK, so the B550 is very close to the X470.

Considering the 300/400 series chipsets were made on 55nm, maybe its a die shrink to 40nm or even 28nm ?

Kaarme
Senior Member

Posts: 1880
Joined: 2013-03-10

#5713955 Posted on: 09/24/2019 10:14 AM

Should be cheap with those specs. Really cheap compared to X570.

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