Gigabyte B550 AORUS Master Motherboard Review

How Much Does it Cost?

Of course, I’m writing this review before the stock is available on Amazon. However, I will update the prices as the stock goes live after we publish the review. For now, though, you can check the up to date stock on Amazon UK here, and on Amazon US here.

Overview

The Gigabyte B550 AORUS Master Motherboard is incredible, it’s rammed full of premium features and well, that puts it in a very strange position. At what point do you think of going for the “mid-range” B550 chipset over the more expensive X570 chipset? This is a very high-end board for a mid-range chipset, and it’s got far more in common with an X570 but it doesn’t have the same number of Gen4 lanes. Of course, if you only need 1 Gen4 PCIe slot and M.2, I guess that’s fine too. However, this clearly isn’t going to be a mass-market choice for consumers.

Build Quality & Design

It’s as good as they come, and I absolutely mean that. They don’t call this board the MASTER for nothing, it’s basically the best AORUS has to offer from their consumer motherboards. Sure, they have an XTREME series beyond that, but that’ll be your X570 flagship stuff. You get the best VRMs, chokes, capacitors, with more robust cooling, and even a better aesthetic design to the whole thing. Bolt the best bits together nicely and you get the MASTER, it’s truly the some of its parts really.

Performance

All of the B550 traded blows and changed places from one test to the other, and I bet if I tested them tomorrow, the results would change yet again. The Gigabyte B550 AORUS Master Motherboard is a bit of a beast, and when it comes to hitting your boost clocks or overclocking your CPU, there’s no doubt it’ll get the job done 100% of the time. That being said, it’s true performance comes from the additional features such as Gen 4 PCIe and M.2, and super-fast networking thanks to WiFi 6 and 2.5 GbE LAN.

Added Value

It’s not so much added value for money as much as you get what you pay for, and you’re paying for all of it. The MASTER is extremely well equipped though, with triple M.2 mounts, one of which offers Gen 4 speeds, all of which have large heatsinks installed. There are ultra-fast WiFi and LAN options. you get Type-C built-in. Plus, you get some truly fantastic audio thanks to their AMP-Up design.

Should I Buy One?

This is basically everything you can expect from a flagship X570 motherboard turned into a B550 chipset motherboard. It’s easily one of the best B550 we’ll ever see and I love it. Obviously, you pay for that luxury, but for the enthusiast PC gamer that doesn’t quite need X570, it’ll do just nicely.