Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master Preview
Introduction
We continue to work tirelessly here at OC3D to bring you all the news that is news, and give you a glimpse at what is upcoming in the endlessly progressing world of hardware.
Today we’re taking a slight step back from things at the cutting edge to look at three B550 motherboards. The B550 chipset brings you the main elements of the AMD X570 chipset, but at a more cost effective price point. One only has to look at the incredible popularity of the B450 chipset to understand how fast these sell. After all, if you’re on a budget then you only really need one blazing fast PCI Express slot and M.2 slot, and anything more than that is a bonus.
As always when we’re this far away from launch there are some details which are sketchy, and some which we’re not allowed to tell you. A large part of the reason we’re beginning with the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master is that it has the most information available and therefore should give us the clearest indication of the specifications and feature set that we can expect from the baby AMD chipset.
Without further ado, particularly as we’re all about to be freed from lockdown and the beach is more inviting than your bedroom, let’s see what the Aorus Master brings to the party.
Technical Specifications and Fan Headers
The B550 might be a theoretically cut down version of the X570 chipset, but looking at the features on this Aorus Master we’re struggling to find an area in which it’s lacking. We have high bandwidth from USB 3.2 Gen2 ports. It still has PCI Express 4.0 on board. Whilst PCI Express 4.0 doesn’t make a lot of difference to your GPU, even an RTX 2080 Ti, it has a profound effect upon the transfer rates of a suitable M.2 drive, and fast transfer rates make your whole system feel much more responsive. Like a water boatman instead of a slug. Networking finds both the Intel WiFi 6 802.11AX that dominated the X570 releases, with 2.5G LAN for your home networking needs, or just the needs of those of you with jealousy-inducing internet connections.
That’s the basics out of the way. We know you’re keen to see it in the flesh so let’s see how many fan headers you get and then we’ll move on.
Keeping your system cool is vital to getting smooth and consistent performance, especially as we move into the summer months. Well, OC3D is British so the summer month. But we’re sure those of you in California or Australia will appreciate the amount of fan headers available on the Aorus Master.
