Upgrading to AMD’s Ryzen 3000 platform may be about to become easier (and cheaper) since the first photos of full-fat B550 motherboards have surfaced online. AMD launched the B550A platform for OEMs towards the end of 2019, which was more of a B450 refresh rather than a brand-new budget 500 series platform. However, this latest sighting seems to be the real deal B550 enthusiasts have been waiting for.

 The strange B550A launch last year brought OEM system builders a refreshed B450 platform to build new AMD Ryzen 3000 systems on that convinced customers they were getting a completely brand-new system with a 500 series motherboard. The full B550 motherboard has been AMD’s best kept secret, with very little official information coming from the company, in fact, B550 has never been confirmed by AMD.

PC Enthusiasts looking for a cost-effective path to upgrade to AMD’s Ryzen 3000 platform have been forced to use older 400 series motherboards, which means missing out on certain features of the new CPU architecture. The photo released by the guys over at VideoCardz today of a true B550 motherboard will come as welcome news to many.

So, what we are looking at here is a new motherboard with the full AMD B550 chipset. Which means complete support for PCIe 4.0, unlike the B550A that only supported PCIe 4.0 on the primary PCIe x16 slot, the B550 chipset based motherboard is expected to support the full PCIe 4.0 standard on all PCIe slots, just like the higher priced X570 motherboards.

The image uploaded by VideoCardz from a source at SOYO, which is linked to the Chinese brand Maxsun, shows a low-cost B550M microATX motherboard with just two DIMM slots, no cooling for the VRM MOSFET, two PCIe X16 slots and an M.2 slot that could also potentially support the PCIe 4.0 standard and the faster 5000 MB/s data transfer speeds that come with it.

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KitGuru says: This photo of a B550 motherboard gives us hope that more B550 platforms will be available soon from established manufacturers, offering PC builders a cost-effective option to upgrade to AMD Ryzen 3000 and PCIe 4.0. The B550 platform should be ideal for gamers who don’t require all the bells and whistles of the X570 platform while enabling the option to upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 graphics card in the future.

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