MSI MAG B550M Mortar Review

Test Setup

As well as the B550 motherboards we’re also including our X570 motherboards in our graphs today, just to demonstrate how little the ‘lesser’ AMD Chipset is giving up compared to its bigger brother. Perfect if you’re on a tight budget.

MSI MAG B550M Mortar
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

The reduction in the power phases meant that, try as we might, the MSI MAG B550M Mortar became the second motherboard we tested, after the ASUS Strix-F, to top out at 4.35 GHz across all 12 cores of our test Ryzen 9 3900X. Only 50 MHz shy of the best we’ve seen, but when you multiply that across all 24 threads that’s just over a GigaHertz less. We’re old enough to remember when the idea of a 1 GHz processor was a pipe dream. Now we lose that much to little actual effect.