Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master Review

PCI Express Layout

The PCI Express layour is the difference between a lot of the B550 boards. Other than the more visible component specification, VRM quality is going to be how the manufacturers decide to use the PCI Express lanes available between the CPU and the chipset. We have already done a preview on the Aorus Pro Motherboard and the difference between the two boards and how they use the lanes specifically for storage purposes is significant.

The Master’s M.2 storage lanes are all PCIe 4.0 which sounds brilliant but it does come with a slight drawback. While the top M.2 is wired directly to the CPU the second and third slots share bandwidth with the PCIe (GPU) connector, so if you use those slots the GPU will run at 8x.

Either way the Master gives you plenty of high speed storage options, but you do just have to consider the impact this may have on the rest of your system.