AMD's B550 chipset based motherboards are to be released next month, and albeit all details are known and shared, the B series historically has been a more 'budget' platform sitting in a 75 to 150 USD range.

New data was posted in a google spreadsheet as the colleagues from TPU notice, the post by Brian, a Gigabyte community manager at Reddit reveals pricing for their B550 series. Much has been said and spoken about B550, but as you'll see the cheapest model starts at 94 USD, the B550M DS3H which is priced okay I guess. The most expensive B550 Aorus Master, however, is priced a whopping 279 USD, and that is quite a sum of money for a B series motherboard. 

B550 motherboards normally would just get one M.2. slot at four PCIe gen 4.0 lanes + the GPU at PCIe Gen 4.0. The chipset otherwise is Gen 3.0. Here's a kicker, the B550 Aorus Master does have three M2 slots. Next to the single x4 lanes for one 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 4.0 and then all of a sudden you can use three m.2. SSDs at Gen 4.0. The B550 AORUS MASTER is a beefy one, it gets a 14+2 phase power supply, VRM cooling module, Realtek 2.5GbE network and Intel Wi-Fi 6 wireless.

The motherboard has reinforced RAM slots and the top PCIe slot is reinforced as well. It has 8+4 pins for the CPU which might indicate that this motherboard is designed with overclocking in mind. A release is expected in June, we'll see but this is a clever trick as x8 Gen 4.0 is the same bandwidth as x16 gen 3.0, e.g. any graphics card will run plenty fast on that slot. 

Gigabyte Cheat Sheet Shows B550 Aorus Motherboard Pricing running upwards to $279