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.





