News MSI Reveals B550 Torpedo, A Potential Successor to the B450 Tomahawk

[Admin]

MSI takes the wraps off its new B550 Torpedo motherboard for Ryzen CPUs.

MSI Reveals B550 Torpedo, A Potential Successor to the B450 Tomahawk : Read more

 

[HideOut]

Hopefully it'll have a good audio chips set too, at least the 1200 series. if it does this could be the board to have for most common gaming builds

 

[cryoburner]

Hopefully it'll have a good audio chips set too, at least the 1200 series. if it does this could be the board to have for most common gaming builds

They have a link to the product page in the article, and the Torpedo does appear to have an ALC1200 audio chipset with six ports including optical out, just like the B550 Tomahawk.

Actually, feature-wise, I'm struggling to find almost anything different from the Tomahawk, and comparing images of the two boards side-by-side, the board layouts look almost identical. The only real noticeable changes to the face of the board are smaller heatsinks, with no heatsink for the second M.2 slot, and no RGB around the chipset heatsink. And on the back panel, only the second networking port is gone. Aside from that, nothing appears to have changed.

Compared to the B550M Bazooka, that board has one less PCIe x16 slot, two fewer SATA ports, no USB 3.2 Gen2 with type-C, only ALC892 audio with just three audio ports, no 2.5G networking, three fewer fan headers, no integrated IO shield, and less-capable VRMs.

So, unlike what the article states, the Torpedo is not at all like the Bazooka. It appears to be almost identical to the Tomahawk, with only smaller heatsinks and the removal of the second networking port to differentiate it. It's also more fully featured than the A Pro. So, price-wise, I would expect it to be priced higher than both the Bazooka and the A Pro, unless they are planning price cuts or something. The Tomahawk is currently $180, while the Bazooka is $130 and the A Pro $140, so I would expect it to priced more in the $150-$160 range. Probably not any higher than that though, as that would put it too close to the Tomahawk.