B550 vs. X570 VRM
At long last AMD more budget-oriented B550 motherboards will finally go on sale.
The main reason why the B550 range costs more than the B450 is simple: it’s way better.
The B550 Tomahawk, for example, isn’t just the B450 Tomahawk with the newer chipset.
That same VRM can be found on the $130 B550M Bazooka.
So in theory the B550 Tomahawk has 83% of the X570 Tomahawk’s current capacity.
There’s more features onboard as well.
The VRM heatsinks are also larger and you get a better quality PCB with 2 ounce thickened copper.
The ~20% premium doesn’t sound too unreasonable given those upgrades.
It’s also worth noting that the B450 Tomahawk and its Max variant aren’t going away overnight either.
So you’ll still be able to purchase B450 boards for some time after the B550 release.
There seem to be other X570 boards around that $160 price point, too.
Whether that experiment pays off, we’ll know eventually.
Placing load on the CPU isBlenderrunning the Gooseberry workload and the temperatures are reported after an hour.
Monitoring the ambient temperature is a thermocouple positioned next to the test system.
Here are our baseline results with essentially out of the box Ryzen 9 3900X performance with PBO enabled.
The X570-A Pro ran hotter, but avoided throttling in this test.
Then we have the B550 Aorus Master matching the X570 Aorus Xtreme with a peak temperature of 55C.
Looking at overclocked results with theRyzen 9 3900Xrunning all cores at 4.3 GHz using 1.4v.
With a small amount of air-flow there is no AM4 CPU this board won’t handle with ease.
Plus, CPU support and overall board quality was almost always worse, making them an easy pass.
