ASUS ROG Strix B550-I Gaming Review

Test Setup

As we will show you in a moment, overclocking isn’t exactly the Strix ITX forte, so rather than bury it in amongst the full Zen 2 graphs as we used on the previous B550 reviews, we’re focussing just upon the latest AMD chipset today.

ASUS ROG Strix B550-I Gaming
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
G.Skill Trident Z 3600 MHz
Corsair Vengeance RGB 4600 MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 – OS Drive
Aorus PCIE4 NVME – Storage Speed Tests
Nvidia RTX 2080Ti
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H150i
Corsair ML Fans

Overclocking and VRM Monitoring

Usually at this point we show off how well the motherboard managed to overclock our Ryzen 9 3900X, but despite spending days tinkering and tweaking the Strix refused to run faster than the 4.25 GHz we see here. Running with an external fan blowing on the VRMs didn’t make a difference, nor did pumping unholy amounts of voltage through our CPU. So whilst we could show you the results compared to the other B550 motherboards we’ve tested the massive gap in ultimate overclocking would render it entirely pointless, so instead we’re just going to be looking at the stock results. We’ll come back to this point in our conclusion.

  

By now you should all be used to the insanity that is ASUS decision to hide their VRM temperatures on their lower end boards. The Strix ITX, sadly, is no exception.

  

The fan doesn’t even appear as a tunable option in the ASUS software.