ASUS ROG Strix B550-XE Gaming WiFi Preview

Up Close – Contents

One of the big differences between the B550 chipset and the X570 is the amount of PCI Express lanes built in to the chipset and thus available for you to spread amongst your drives and GPU. The B550-XE comes complete with a four M.2 x16 PCIe 4.0 RAID expansion card, which surely must stretch the limits of the PCI Express lanes? Thankfully we don’t think too many people who have the money to spend on four M.2 drives will be the type of people to look at a B550 instead of a X570, so it’s probably small potatoes. An odd thing to include though.

  
  

Just because it’s an unexpected inclusion doesn’t mean that the build quality isn’t up to ASUS usual high standards, and giving us the ability to turn the fan off, particularly if you’re only running a couple of drives, is a nice touch.

  

Away from surprising inclusions and returning to more standard offerings, within the box we find the manual and driver disc, as well as the always handy cable identification stickers and plenty of logos if you want to show off your choice of purchase to the world.

  

SATA cables, for those of you who don’t already own millions of the things. It’s always nice to put new ones in though.

  

RGB extension cables because if the modern trend to RGB lighting has taught us anything it’s that companies will give you too little cable at even the slightest provocation.

  

The ROG Type-C to audio jack cable which has been a recent addition to the latest ASUS motherboards.

  

And lastly the B550-XE wouldn’t be a WiFi motherboard if it didn’t come complete with the WiFi antenna which reminds us of the building shaped like a sail in Dubai, or for the older people out there a small piece of the Sydney Opera House.