AMD has already announced the AMD Ryzen 3100 and 3300X budget CPUs that support PCIe Gen 4. Here we have the GIGABYTE B550 AORUS MASTER that comes with 3 PCIe Gen4 M.2 slots. This appears to be a mid-range motherboard with a 16-phase power delivery system and VRM cooling.
All the PCIe Gen4 M.2 slots on the GIGABYTE B550 AORUS MASTER have heatsinks so you can get an M.2 SSD without a heatsink. Or you could replace the motherboard heatsink with the one that comes with the SSD.
GIGABYTE B550 AORUS MASTER
The motherboard has plenty of armor and has a cool black and silver theme. You can check out the motherboard below:
The motherboard has reinforced RAM slots and the top PCIe slot is reinforced as well. It has 8+4 pins for the CPU which might indicate that this motherboard is designed with overclocking in mind.
It is interesting to see that even the budget AMD Ryzen CPUs support PCIe Gen4 when none of the Intel 10th generation chips have this feature even though the support is baked into the Z490 motherboards.
The GIGABYTE B550 AORUS MASTER will support the 3rd generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs as well as the upcoming AMD Zen 3 based CPUs. AMD has confirmed that these new motherboards will not support older CPUs. The following is what AMD had to say regarding the matter:
AMD officially plans to support next-gen AMD Ryzen desktop processors, with the “Zen 3” architecture, on AMD X570 and B550 motherboards. This will require a BIOS update. Specific details about this update will come at a later time, but we’re committed to keeping you up-to-date.
So the GIGABYTE B550 AORUS MASTER will support AMD Ryzen 3rd generation out of the box but you will need to update the BIOS if you are interested in using future AMD Ryzen CPUs with this motherboard.
Let us know what you think about this motherboard and whether or not you are interested in upgrading to the budget AMD Ryzen 3 CPUs or the upcoming Zen 3 chips.