Msi B550 A Pro Review

What We Have Learned

These new B550 motherboards represent a major upgrade to the two-year old B450 platform. MSI and Gigabyte did a great job on the models that we tested today. We’re eager to test the base models and see how they perform with the 3900X. From the looks of it, for a little over $100 you’ll be able to buy a motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 along with high-end AM4 CPUs.

The B550 platform delays are even more annoying for Ryzen 5 3600 owners who have a brand new motherboard. These B550 boards can support PCIe 4.0 storage and cards, as well as a seamless transition to Zen 3 processors.

There’s always a chance that you’ll want to purchase a Zen 3 component with additional cores if you purchased a Ryzen 5, 3600, a year ago. But that story is for another year.

In the meantime, the new AMD B550 chipset can be viewed as another nail in Intel 10th-gen Core series coffin. The B550 Tomahawk, for example, is slightly cheaper than the Z490 Tomahawk, but you get PCIe 4.0. MSI B550 Pro Pro board will stand out. The MSI B550 Pro Pro is $140. This looks to be a solid board.

A520 boards can also be purchased at lower prices, but until something exceptional happens we will largely ignore them in the future. This is similar to how we treated A320 boards. The A520 boards were cheaper than the A320 boards, and you would often lose your CPU or memory overclocking. Also, the board quality and support for CPUs was often poorer than expected, making this a good choice.

.Msi B550 A Pro Review