News ASRock's B550AM-Gaming Motherboard Features PCI-Express 4.0 & Beefy VRMs

[Admin]

When leaks start to get this juicy, you know the real product is getting close.

ASRock's B550AM-Gaming Motherboard Features PCI-Express 4.0 & Beefy VRMs : Read more

 

[Gillerer]

The specifications we found now, however, point to the motherboard having PCI-Express 4.0 on all fronts.

More like it supports PCIe 4 for connections between the CPU, GPU (in the primary slot), and the primary M.2.

The motherboard itself doesn't have PCIe 4 (meaning the chipset doesn't).

The B550A is a rebranded B450, with the difference being that the motherboards using it will be designed with good enough PCIe routing to support PCIe 4 (from the CPU), and the AGESA doesn't lock out gen 4 on the CPU's PCIe controllers.

Gamers Nexus bought a prebuilt with it and ran some tests:

"AMD "B550" Chipset vs. B550A, B450 Explained: ASRock B550AM Gaming Benchmarks"
a YouTube video by Gamers Nexus, from 2020-02-13:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBympJkflks

 

[x4130]

Alienware’s specs for the Aurora Ryzen Edition back this up as well- B550A chipset, PCIe 4.0 only available on the M.2 and top GPU slot via CPU (and only PCIe 3.0/4.0 x8 for the GPU in their case, meaning a 2080 Ti leaves almost half its theoretical bandwidth on the table in that rig).

B550A on its own does NOT appear to support PCIe 4.0.

 

[Gillerer]

All the Aurora Ryzen Edition models I can see have 8GB+ VRAM.

PCIe Gen 3 x8 bandwidth only becomes a bottleneck if you're VRAM-starved, and the driver needs to augment it with system memory a lot.

That's why it reduces performance on the 4GB 5500XT, but not the 8GB model (and then only on high settings).

If you have plenty of VRAM, you won't see an appreciable difference. (And I think 11GB for the 2080Ti is always enough; depending on settings and resolution - ones you'd be wanting to use on an 5700/XT - so is 8GB).

 

[x4130]

Very fair point about the VRAM; I still have some “not getting what you’re supposedly paying for” annoyance with Alienware for some of their their internal hardware decisions, but you’re right that it likely makes no difference in FPS out to a monitor.

Unrelated, looks like they’ve updated the article to acknowledge the CPU-only PCIe 4.0 aspect.

 

[Gillerer]

Continued...

Gamers Nexus has now published Buildzoid's VRM analysis video on this board:

"AMD "B550" PCB Quality Analysis: ASRock B550A M Gaming Motherboard"
a YouTube video by Gamers Nexus, from 2020-02-22:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZWHe-7Dlo&t=0s


This news piece's hot-take analysis (read: "guess") of the VRM:

However, this ASRock B550AM Gaming motherboard is packed with a whopping 10 VRM phases using ASRock's Digi power design, and there is also a hefty heatsink on them for cooling. That's a level of VRM circuitry that we've only seen on the higher-end X-series chipsets in recent year.

is wrong.

This has the same base cheap 8+2 phase power delivery design of the low-end ASRock X570 motherboards, only with many of the filtering bypass capacitors stripped (around half of them).

It's still ok for a prebuilt, because this is "a motherboard that's only ever going to run at stock" and "realistically no one is going to overclock on this board" (as per the video).

So really, adapting the wording of the original news article, this is a level of VRM circuitry worse than any ASRock put out for X570, and only suitable for stock operation.

This is absolutely not for people who want good VRM. The article should be corrected on that part, so people aren't misled.