Asus ROG Strix B550-A Motherboard Review: Is It Ryzen 5000 Series Ready?

A good motherboard can make or break your system’s performance and stability. If you’re not sure what to look for in a motherboard, you might end up buying one that doesn’t have the capabilities that you want or need, resulting in subpar results or maybe even needing to upgrade your entire system after just a year or two. That’s why I decided to review the ASUS ROG Strix B550-A motherboard based on my own experience with it and on my research of its specs and features, including an assessment of how it will handle upcoming AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors.

A Closer Look at the ASUS ROG Strix B550-A Gaming Motherboard

The ASUS ROG Strix B550-A is a midrange, gaming motherboard that features a colorful RGB aesthetic. Built for gamers who are interested in streaming their gameplay but aren’t quite ready to shell out big bucks for a motherboard designed specifically for streaming, it's got everything you need at an affordable price. But, is it Ryzen 5000 series ready? Let’s take a closer look.

The Features of The Asus Rog Strix B550

The Asus Rog Strix B550 is a gaming motherboard with a high emphasis on style. Designed to be eye-catching, it has blue LED light strips that extend from between its two DIMM slots to just above its socket area. Its center comes equipped with an RGB header, which you can use to connect lighting devices such as controllers or strips. While not specifically targeted at gamers (who might not need another glowing light), it is still an interesting and cool effect. This motherboard also supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, including configurations with four 16GB sticks.

The Benchmarks For The Asus Rog Strix B550

The first thing we did was benchmark its performance to see how it stacked up against other budget motherboards. We started by running benchmarks for processor intensive tasks like gaming and streaming, then did memory tests, run simulations using 3D modelling software for rendering, and then finally stress tested with high levels of CPU load. For testing our Asus Rog Strix B550-A motherboard we used an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8 core processor with 32GB DDR4 RAM. We chose these parts because they represent a modern day build with plenty of power without being at all overkill for a budget PC build.

Does the ASUS ROG Strix B550-A gaming motherboard come Ryzen 5000 series ready?

This motherboard supports AMD® RyzenTM 2nd Generation/RyzenTM with RadeonTM Vega Graphics/RyzenTM 1st Generation/7th Generation A-series/Athlon X4 processors* and dual channel DDR4 memory. The integrated graphics boasts shared video memory with the CPU, giving you a powerful integrated solution for everything from office work to playing games. With up to 64GB of DDR4 memory supported by four DIMMs, there is plenty of space for your graphics and media libraries. The RGB lighting allows you to choose from up to 8 colors in three different zones (ASUS Aura Sync compatible). In addition, four new turbo fan headers help users control their system cooling even better by allowing them to connect multiple case fans directly to their motherboard.

Conclusion

A new and better version of AMD’s FX processor was just released, which can operate at higher speeds while also reducing power consumption. This is great news for people looking to build a computer that can perform well but doesn’t waste too much electricity. While they are nice, though, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend them over Intel Core processors since they lack some core features like Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost 2.0. If you have a lot of money to spend on a processor and want one that performs well without sacrificing efficiency, it would be a good idea to wait for Ryzen 7 before purchasing anything else, even if your budget might not allow it.