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AMD’s B550 motherboards are finally here, bringing PCIe 4.0 to the massesThe ideal motherboard for the Ryzen 3 3300X
The ideal motherboard for the Ryzen 3 3300X
If you’ve been eyeing up AMD’s excellentRyzen 3 3300XCPUs recently, then you’ll be pleased to hear that AMD’s new mid-range B550 motherboards have finally arrived to buy alongside them. The long-awaited successor to AMD’s popular B450 chipset, the main advantage of buying a new B550 board is that it’s got built-in support for AMD’s next CPU architecture, currently code-named Zen 3, giving you plenty of future-proofing for your next upgrade.
PCIe 4.0, in case you’ve forgotten, gives you loads more bandwidth than the existing PCIe 3.0 standard, allowing up to 32GB/s of data flowing in each direction instead of the current 16GB/s. Provided you’ve got PCIe 4.0 compatible hardware plugged in, this should lead to significantly better performance across the board - although how much benefit you’ll see when it comes to gaming remains to be seen at the moment, as few games demand that kind of data flow right now. Still, with AMD’s hardware sitting at the heart of both next-gen consoles come the end of the year, it’s only a matter of time before PCIe 4.0 starts coming into its own.
The B550 chipset also comes with support for up to two native USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (plus six USB 3.1 ports and six USB 2.0 ports), as well as up to eight SATA ports for any existing 2.5in SSDs you’ve got knocking around, and overclocking support.
The downside? They’reonly going to be compatible with 3rd Gen Ryzen processors. Sadly, that doesn’t include the Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G APUs, and it doesn’t look like AMD will be issuing any BIOS updates so that 1st or 2nd Gen Ryzen owners will be able to use their existing CPUs with it either.
