A Closer Look
There’s no doubt about it, the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-E Gaming is one fantastic looking motherboard. STRIX motherboards have long been some of the best-looking motherboards anyway, and despite these being the “mid-range” B550 chipset, they’re still every bit as good looking as the more high-end X570 motherboards. Black hardware, subtle dark grey highlights and just a really tidy and uniform design overall.
AT the top of the motherboard, you’ll find some pretty serious power delivery hardware. It uses a 14+2 Power Stage design with ASUS Digi+ Power Control. All the chokes and caps are great quality too, and it’s really everything you would expect from a premium motherboard. There are some massive heatsinks on there too, and overall it should be a bit of a beast when it comes to hitting boost clocks and overclocking.
Power comes from the ProCool Power Connectors up the top here.
Moving down, you’ll find there are two M.2 drive mounts, both with large heatsinks applied to them for added cooling performance. Plus, I think they look great, and they protect the drives PCB too. The top one is PCIe Gen 4 x4, and the bottom is Gen 3 x4.
One thing that does stand out is that this motherboard has TWO Gen4 PCIe lanes. Pretty much every other B550 board tested today has just the one, so there’s certainly some appeal here. Then again, this board is closer to an actual X570 board than most too. Both those slots are armoured. There’s an additional 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (x4) and 2 x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots that are run from the chipset rather than the CPU. Both Gen 4 slots are fed from the CPU.
The audio hardware on this motherboard is pretty fantastic. It uses the SupremeFX S1220A Codec, which we know to be brilliant. That also comes with Impedance sensing, Shielding, Dual OP amps, Sonic Studio III, Virtual Mixer, Sonic Radar III, and DTS Sound Unbound!
The rear I/O shield is pre-installed, and it offers up eight USB ports, with a mixture of USB 2, 3.2 Gen 2 and Type C. However, one of them is actually marked as Audio Type-C which you can use with many modern headphones etc, pretty cool to include that specifically. There’s great networking too, thanks to both 2.5 GbE LAN and Intel WiFi 6.
