Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro Preview

Introduction

Oh the weather outside is delightful, but our to-do pile is frightful, so whilst you're all enjoying the glorious end of May sunshine let's give you a run through what the B550 chipset brings to the AMD party in light of the success of their Ryzen 3rd Gen CPUs.

Wherever there is a flagship chipset - in this case the X570 - there will always be one that removes a few of the less essential features to enable those of us with more limited budgets to be able to join the fun. With the 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs proving to be every bit as good as anything else available on the market the explosion in AMD users is well deserved for their hard work is rejuvenating the company with the Zen architecutre. The B550 promises to bring all that you'll need to still explore the best of their desktop CPU range without busting the bank on your motherboard.

We've already looked at the bigger brother to the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master, so let's take a look at the Aorus Pro, which still has all the parts we want - PCI Express 4.0 (albeit few lanes than the X570),  USB 3.2 Gen2, support for 5GHz+ DDR4 and all the Ryzen CPUs. In fact it's tough to see exactly what you're missing out on if you choose to go down the B550 route. Let's have a look at the specifications and then dive straight in to the pictures of it live and in the flesh.

Technical Specifications

Normally with cut down chipsets the first things to go are the amount of storage connections and USB ports, but despite poring over the details with a fine tooth comb we're having difficulty seeing exactly what the X570 brings to the table that the B550 doesn't. Yes there is a reduction in PCI Express 4.0 lanes, but the amount of people running Crossfire GPUs and three PCIe4.0 M.2 is slim indeed. For the regular user this appears to have all you need.