Asrock B550M-HDV Gaming Motherboard Review

Butcher79

September 7, 2020

The new Asrock B550M board is cheap. Is this a bad deal? Let's figure it out!

FOR⇧

Quiz: Which Marvel Hero Are You?

10 questions

I will answer everything!

➤Affordable price
➤Good all-round performance
➤Has really important features you need

AGAINST ⇩

➤Limited Expansion
➤No USB-C
➤Four-phase power supply

Part of AMD's second tier of its new 550-series chipsets, our first look at the B500 included several boards at a fairly premium price. Then came the Asrock B550 Taichi, a monster $550 B300 motherboard. Perhaps the whole thing was getting a little silly. Now Asrock is back, but this time with the B550 option, it's a lot more than we originally expected.

At around $80, it's more comfortable in the B550's value-oriented market positioning. Not that the B550 is a slacker. In fact, by most measures, it is not far from its older brother X570. The key difference between the two is the connection between the processor and the PCH chip, the latter is essentially the motherboard chipset thanks to most of what used to be chipset functionality now found in the processor package. For the B550, this channel consists of a quartet of Gen 570 PCI Express lanes. X4? It is also quad-lane, but with Gen XNUMX specification and double the bandwidth.

The most immediate and obvious consequence is storage. You still get Gen 4 links directly to the CPU with the B550 chipset. There are 16 graphics lanes and four more storage lanes available to support a quad-lane PCI-E Gen 4 M.2 SSD. But where the X570 adds support for a second M.2 Gen 4 drive connected to a PCH chip, the B2's secondary M.550 slot is limited to PCI-E Gen 3 speeds.

CHARACTERISTICSKI ASROCK B550M-HDV

Chipset —
Connector AMD B550 -
Processor Compatibility AM4-
Form Factor AMD Ryzen 3000 -
Expansion slots Micro ATX - 1x PCIe 4.0 x16, 1x PCIe 3.0 x4
Storage - 1x M.2, 4x SATA 6Gb/s
Network -Gb Ethernet
Rear USB port - 4 x USB 3.2 Gen, 2 x USB 2.0
Other ports on the back - HDMI, DVI, VGA, PS2, audio, microphone
Price - 80 US dollars.

The slower PCH connection has implications for other bandwidth-sensitive features, including the USB connection. But the consequences are not so severe. It still supports up to two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, something the B450 didn't have. Of course, the B550 is a new platform, so it includes support for both the latest AMD Ryzen 3000 processors and upcoming Zen 3 architecture-based processors due later this year under the Ryzen 4000 brand. So, there is a decent check for the future.

If this is the general theory behind the B550, what about the specific Asrock B550M-HDV implementation? Undoubtedly, it looks as cheap as it looks at first glance. For example, you only have two DIMM memory slots. There is only one additional four-pin CPU power connector, which does not bode well for overclocking. There is no minimum cooling. The VRMs are bare, the power supply is only four-phase, and only two fan headers are available.

Elsewhere, there is one USB 3.2 Gen 1 connector, a pair of USB 2.0 connectors, a total of four SATA ports, and a PCI-E 3.0 x1 slot. On the rear panel there are four USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a pair of USB-A 2.0, LAN, PS2, HDMI, VGA and DVI connectors. What's not there? USB-C or DisplayPort.

Gaming Performance

Equipment performance

Of course, all this is done to ignore perhaps the two most important features besides the AM4 processor socket, namely the x16 PCI-E 4.0 graphics slot and the quad-lane PCI-E 4.0 M.2 port. In other words, there is a really important component to the performance of the PC core in theory. And practice proves it. The Asrock B550M-HDV delivers more than decent performance compared to much more expensive boards in almost all of our base clock tests.

TEST SET

CPU  - AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Memory  - 16 GB HyperX DDR4-3000
GPU  -MSI GTX 1070 GamingX
Storage - PSU Addlink S90 1TB - Phantec 1000W

This includes an advantage over Asrock's own B550 Taichi board, which costs about four times as much. This includes CPU performance, storage, gaming, and more. In fact, this budget board is faster than the Taichi megabuck in some tests, although all results are close enough to be within the margin of error and run-to-run variation. Simply put, you will never feel the difference when it comes to subjective computer experience when it comes to this board compared to more expensive options.

At least, this is so at standard frequencies. What about overclocking? Like the Asrock Taichi, the B550M-HDV does not allow you to adjust the multiplier and allows the board to automatically select the CPU voltage. So, beginners will need to take care. But with the processor running at 1,3V, this board delivers exactly the same 4,2GHz all-core clock as just about every B550 we tested with our quad-core AMD Ryzen 3100 test chip.

From this we can draw an immediate conclusion: why pay more? The answer is that the Ryzen 3100 is not a particularly demanding chip. You will most likely run into the limitation of this cheap four-phase power plan and minimal cooling when overclocking processors with more than eight cores. Of course, few existing Ryzen processors are really good at overclocking. So this potential limitation is not a big deal. It is possible that future AMD processors based on the Zen 3 architecture will provide more headroom. But that's speculative and, at this price point, you'll never get the last word in overclocking anyway.

In general, our main caveat is the features. It would be nice to have at least one USB-C connector here in 2020, plus a second M.2 slot. Either, but not both, you can add with a PCI-E x1 card, although the M.2 slot will be limited to the low speed x1 PCI-E 3.0. And that's extra money.