The only ACTUAL, tangible differences between B450 and B550 motherboards are the fact that B550 has native PCIe 4.0 support and more USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, as well as potentially internal headers as well. Some B450 boards have them, but not all, but none of them have PCIe 4.0 support.
As I said before, UNLESS you are going to use a PCIe 4.0 graphics card AND/OR a PCIe 4.0 NVME drive, you are not going to see any real benefit from the use of a B550 motherboard or any motherboard, such as X570, that has native PCIe 4.0 support. And even then, we haven't REALLY seen this translate into tangible performance gains yet for the most part because those PCIe 4.0 NVME drives haven't really offered a substantial increase yet in random performance, and you are not going to see those advertised sequential performance numbers unless you are writing to another equally fast NVME drive OR reading from a very large installer or other file.
Windows operating system pretty much "lives" and dies by the random reads and writes, and this is where increased IOPS can really make a difference in how fast things feel or even translate into noticeable performance gains in some cases. Sequential reads and writes, are nice, but you rarely see this except in benchmarks.
For graphics cards, if you are planning to upgrade your graphics card soon, then you MIGHT see some difference in performance, but much as when we went from PCIe 2.0 to 3.0, it is unlikely that there will be any "Wow" factor, and in fact I'm pretty sure I haven't heard anything about there being one from any of the X570 owners running Navi cards. As seen here:
Looking at the results, we can see a whole lot of nothing. PCI-Express 4.0 achieves only tiny improvements over PCI-Express 3.0—in the sub-1-percent range When averaged over all our benchmarks, we barely notice a 1% difference to PCIe Gen 3. I also included data for PCI-Express Gen 2, data which can be used interchangeably to represent PCIe 3.0 x8 (or PCIe 4.0 x4). Here, the differences are a little bit more pronounced, but with 2%, not much to write home about, either. These results align with what we found in previous PCI-Express scaling articles.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/pci-express-4-0-performance-scaling-radeon-rx-5700-xt/24.html
So the benefits, at least for THIS generation of PCIe 4.0 capable hardware, seems to be largely.........................a big, fat, nothingburger, for the most part. Certainly, on paper, there are POTENTIAL benefits, but as of so far they don't translate into reality, so I don't see the point of paying a LOT more for those boards. Especially when, those CPUs will run fine on last gen chipsets.
Now, if you PLAN to upgrade to a newer Ryzen 4000 series Zen 3 CPU in the next year or so, then it might be worth getting one of those boards now, otherwise, the cost of these B550 and X570 boards will likely be significantly lower in a year, or other boards, that DO have tangible performance benefits and potentially even OTHER newer features, will likely be available by then and THAT might make it worth doing. There's certainly nothing wrong with buying a B550 or X570 motherboard, other than they are unnecessarily expensive compared to B450 and X470, but don't buy one expecting it to offer you some magical gain or benefit over what you could pay a hundred dollars less for.
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