GIGABYTE B550 AORUS Elite (AM4 AMD/B550/ATX/Dual M.2/SATA 6Gb/s/USB 3.2 Gen 2/2.5 GbE LAN/Realtek ALC1200/HDMI/DP/PCIe4.0/DDR4/Gaming Motherboard)

Great board that worked right out of the box. Windows 10 booted first time, and then it was easy to do a clean install and configure everything. The one negative: There is no system fan header on the memory side of the board, to I had to find an extension to connect my front fans to the header next to the 8pin CPU Power connector. I was able to update the BIOS and update all the drivers from the DVD provided App Center while running Windows. I purchased 3200 DDR4 memory and it defaulted to 2300, but it was very easy to turn on XMP by selecting the provided profile 1 in the Easy tune App which sets the clock to 1600 x 2mode for 3200mhz. A great feature is what Gigabyte calls a G-plug. It is basically a plastic collar that does nothing electrically, but it houses your front panel connectors. It is very clearly labeled, so it is very simple to slide each pin/connector for the Power switch and such into the proper position in the G plug, then you just plug it into the motherboard header. Super easy and great idea by Gigabyte that makes install simple and helps with cable management as well. The provided Apps work just fine. The SIV (system information viewer) provides the necessary information to help you ensure your system is running properly and Easytune makes it easy to tweak performance if you so choose. The M.2 heat sink fit is nice. The manual was a bit vague concerning the memory configuration. So, if you go to their website find the motherboard listed in the products. From there click "Support" then Support List, then download/view the Memory Support List "For AMD Matisse CPU" for any of the Ryzen 3000 series. Find your specific memory in the list. Over on the right side will indicate if it will work with XMP and also what the Native frequency is. Most of the higher frequency memory modules need XMP to work at max frequency. To run XMP you need a matched set of 2 or 4 modules. If you are running 2, they need to be in the 2nd and 4th slots (where the first slot is the one nearest the CPU). When you are setting up the computer the memory will run at the Native frequency and then it will clock at half the rated value once XMP has been turned on. If you aren't concerned with XMP, then you can put the memory modules in any slots you want, it will make no difference at the Native speed. The SIV app will properly indicate the speed, so if it is very near your memory rating you have it setup correctly. I know that some B550 motherboards will not run without flashing the BIOS from a thumb drive, but this MB will Post and boot into windows without having to pre flash the BIOS. The board is well made, nice thick PCB and accurate dimensions. Great choice for gaming. As a musician, to my ears anyway, the Realtec ALC1200 Codec built into the Amp-up chip does 7.1 provides great fidelity with my studio monitors, but you might want an external interface or an optional sound card if you are using Studio quality low impedance headphones that are hard to drive. This shouldn't be an issue for most of you but Gigabyte does have other B550 boards with the ALC1220 if you just need a bit more power for your high end headphones. This mother board does not have a USB-C header that might be important for some audio interfaces, though most interfaces work great with the AORUS Elites USB3.2 Gen2 which will shave precious milliseconds off of your latency if you want to record with a Digital Audio Workstation software package. This should be a very fine board for high quality recording and music production particularly with the 4th gen M.2. Noise is introduced in other ways aside from the audio codec and this board is well designed with low noise features that help the codec do its job.

*EDIT 8/13/2021: I forgot to update my review as the issues I listed in my last edit have been fixed for a good while now after a BIOS update that was released, thankfully. So, as long as you have the most recent and up-to-date version from their website (F13 as of writing this), you shouldn't have any of the problems I listed prior. I was able to factory reset my settings after updating and the issues no longer persisted.*EDIT 2/19/2021: Just as caution to those thinking about buying this mobo, for some reason I didn't start having this issue until later down the line and luckily found a fix. This was likely caused by driver and bios updates over time or I was just lucky not to experience it immediately as it's a VERY common issue with this board and many other B550 boards. But, for some odd reason, I started having a big and very repetitive issue with my internet randomly disconnecting completely and I would have to re-plug my ethernet cable into my computer to fix it every time it happened. Then, when I would try to use my VR headset (Valve Index) with my computer and play a game on it or if I tried to stream a game on discord, ALL of my USB devices plugged into the PC would immediately disconnect altogether after 3 seconds of either of these things happening which was frustrating, as any fix I tried that I could think of or find wouldn't do anything to fix it for a while. After researching this, this is a very, very common issue with this motherboard and many others similar to it and somehow hasn't been fixed yet in a BIOS update. Luckily though, it seemed to finally be easily fixed for me by going into the BIOS and changing the PCIe to be Gen3 instead of Gen4, as ever since I did that, the issues stopped happening and I can both stream games on discord and play VR games again just fine. Doing this changed nothing in terms of performance for me personally and everything runs amazingly now without issue. I'm not sure if this is an issue that only happens with the new Ryzen CPUs or NVIDIA GPUs in combination with this motherboard, but if it is and you get this mobo, I hope this fixes it for you too if you run into this problem!*Original Review 11/11/2020: I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to the specific pros and cons of a motherboard in terms of BIOS features and what not, but so far I really like this mobo and have had no problems with it thus far. I recently just upgraded from an i7-8700 on a Z370 board to a Ryzen 7 5800X since I was lucky enough to get my hands on one. But, when I received this board it was not immediately compatible with the new Zen 3/5000 Series AMD CPUs and required a BIOS flash out of the box to get it up and going with it. This was no problem at all to do and the information in this motherboard's description right on the Amazon store page tells you how to do it step by step perfectly, just be sure to have a USB stick with a computer to download the file required to flash it. I can't say much more other than I'm very pleased with this motherboard and would definitely recommend it.My specs used with this board:Case - MUSETEX Phantom Black ATX Mid-TowerCPU - Ryzen 7 5800X @ 4.8 GHz OC w/ CoolerMaster MasterLiquid ML240L V2 AIO for coolingGPU - GIGABYTE RTX 3080 EAGLE OCRAM - 32 GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro, clocked @ CL18 3600 MHz XMPPSU - GAMEMAX RGB 850w Modular 80+ Gold CertifiedStorage - 1x 500 GB SATA SSD, 2x 1TB SATA HDD, 1x M.2 NVMe 1TB SSD

Gran cantidad de opciones para personas exigentes con sus Pc. Me sirve para actualizaciones a largo plazo en la misma mainboard sin necesidad de cambiar componentes, simplemente aumentar mas a ella.

As I was building my computer, I was needing a good board for cheap with a good io. This motherboard was amazing for actually getting off the ground, it has all of the necessary ports i needed (Two monitors, 8 usb ports, and front 3.0 and 2.0. Although, as i started to look for new cases, I realized that there was no usb-c for the front. Resulting in my final decision to get an x570, of course when i can afford it. The usability on this board is absolutely amazing, with the m.2 and pcie slots. it was super easy for me to do the bios update on this board, and I actually had it posted before i updated it. So my advice to you is to not worry about all the people complaining about "Dead On Arrival" or "Crappy bios" which you will almost NEVER need to access unless you're doing basic setup things, and you could probably just look up a youtube tutorial on. If you've got a little more money, get one that's future proof . But if youre on a budget, get it.