The AMD’s B550 mid-range chipset, which is from its 500-series, is considered to be a much more wallet-friendly version of the previous models AMD B450 and B350.
The B550 is supposed to use four PCIe 3.0 lanes instead of four PCIe 4.0 lanes, in order to be linked to the Ryzen 3000 CPU, since it does not support PCIe Gen 4.
PCIe Gen 4 support should still be possible for B550 users via the CPU, so B550 could still feature PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slots from the socket AM4 SoC and at least one of the M.2 NVMe slots on B550 could have PCI-Express 4.0 x4, since they’re wired to the SoC instead of the chipset.
The B550 will also have two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gb/s) and six USB 2.0 ports. As for the storage, the B550 chipset will provide up to eight SATA III ports.
Although PCIe 4.0 boards are not cheap, Gigabyte promises to provide 8 B550 budget-friendly boards.
Gigabyte will provide 8 /eight/ B550 chipset, as follows:
B550 AORUS ELITE
B550 AORUS PRO
B550 GAMING X
B550M AORUS PRO
B550M DS3H
B550M GAMING
B550M H
B550M S2H
It’s not absolutely sure that these boards will be PCIe 4.0, but it’s more likely to be that way, considering the specifications of the B550A chipset.
