[SOLVED] Cant decide between 3 motherboards

[pajosgabros]

Hi,
I want to new AM4 motheboard with B550.
I found 3 of them, but cant decide, which one to buy (for gaming).
Can you reccomend me one of them?

ASUS Prime B550M-A
ASROCK B550M PRO4
ASROCK B550 Phantom Gaming 4

P.S.: In future current CPU (r3 3100) will be replaced by newer Zen

Thank you

 

[drea.drechsler]

The Phantom Gaming 4 is ATX so it won't fit your mATX case if that's why you include the other two in the selection.

The B550M Pro 4 has some pretty massive heatsinking to help with cooling FET's of a true 6-phase vcore VRM. Of that selection I'd probably go with that board but you can't possibly go wrong on either of the other two with a 3100 CPU, assuming you haven't settled on a case yet.

What Zen3 will require is anybody's guess. And anything else depends entirely on what your goals are and what might be important to you: more USB? audio ports? PCIe expansion? styling?

 

[pajosgabros]

I've got midtower case so dimensions of full ATX board are OK.
I dont need more USB's or something special (like WiFi, more PCIe's...)
I will decently OC CPU, later some 6 (r5) or 8 (r7) core

I heard, than Pro4 is slightly better than Phantom Gaming 4 - it's true?
It looks, than Pro4 has got better heatsinking than Phantom 4.
Is AsRock more reilable than Asus?
Which one (AsRock / Asus) has got better (longer) software support?

 

[drea.drechsler]

....
Is AsRock more reilable than Asus?
...

Asus has a good reputation for high-end boards, specifically for extreme sub-zero overclocking, but these are in the budget end of the market so I wouldn't expect significant diference in reliability. And also, B550's are way to soon out of the gate and so much changes from board generation to generation it's not really meaningful to make broad statements about reliability.

I think either will get similar software support as B550 is going to support Zen 3 so you can bet they'll get BIOS updates regularly, just as all the AM4 boards have. Other software (drivers) depends more on AMD's chipset drivers which you can always get latest from AMD support site and as well the Ryzenmaster software.

Don't plan on overclocking. Not because of the boards but because Ryzen 3000 just hasn't anything left. AMD's managed to figure out how to squeeze out all the silicon has to give without sacrificing long life. People try to, but doing it yourself makes it way hotter so it needs much better cooling, reduces processor life. For all that you usually get very little gain in multi-thread performance and usually a loss in lightly threaded performance. Whether Zen 3 will be any different is yet to be seen.