ASUS TUF Gaming B550-PLUS WiFi II AMD AM4 (3rd Gen Ryzen™) ATX Motherboard (PCIe 4.0, WiFi 6, 2.5Gb LAN, BIOS Flashback, USB 3.2 Gen 2, Addressable Gen 2 RGB Header and Aura Sync)

Last year I upgraded my aging Ryzen5 2600 with a Ryzen9 5900X. The choice of an AM4 CPU was somewhat forced by my existing Asus X470-Pro as at the time I did not have enough funds to also replace the motherboard. This year however things have changed a bit and I moved the old CPU+Mobo combo to HTPC duty and bought this ROG Strix B550-F Gaming motherboard.

Installation it is highly dependent on the case from a purely mechanical aspect and not on the motherboard itself. If you have a cramped case you will obviously struggle but otherwise there’s nothin odd or peculiar here, the board will fit medium/small Full ATX cases without issues. Where one may run into trouble is existing PSU/ memory/ Video card/ Drives. But even here, The board booted right up, took the overall performance and the XMP memory settings for both banks (64 GB 3600DDR4 Corsair Vengeance) without any issues. It booted right up and passed thorough memory and overall system stress testing with the same ease Pavarotti was taking difficult arias.

My system is a combined workstation for CAD/ photo processing/ gaming, I value stability and quiet over anything else, things this board delivers without effort. It also delivers mild overclocking when gaming without sweating, the VRM on it is comfortably pushing my CPU to 4.5GHz on all cores without any BIOS voltage fiddling whatsoever. Speaking of BIOS, this one is almost the same interface as the one on my old Asus board and just as easy to use to extract the exact settings one may want.

What more can I say? The best motherboards are the ones running quietly, delivering your expected performance without fuss and much fiddling, even this particular one enables almost unending fiddling for those so inclined.

I’m pretty happy with this purchase, will probably keep it for the next 5-6 years.

So I guess I’m basically just reviewing tech at my own expense at this point, because this is the second motherboard I’ve bought within the space of a month and I’m past the return period for the TUF B450-PLUS II I was using just prior. Reason? Because I’m indecisive and found I was missing some features more than expected.

So onto the details. This pros/cons list thing isn’t my normal review style, but will keep me from turning this into a novel.
Pros:
– It goes on sale a lot, making it a fairly affordable upper-mid end motherboard.
– The one I got came supporting my R5 5600X right out of the box.
– The built-in RGB lighting isn’t overbearing, and interestingly despite not being ARGB can act like it.
– Like all the ROG AM4 500 series boards, it’s just overall great looking.
– If you install Aura Sync(not Aura Creator) you can control the built in lighting with iCUE.
– The fixed I/O shield is great, but for me not a necessity.
– PCIe 4.0 is nice to have, but doesn’t really impact GPU performance.
– ReBAR support is nice to have, but I found it amplifies Nvidia’s current driver issues with some VR games.
– The extra 4-pin CPU power connector is nice, but entirely unnecessary for most users.
– Many more BIOS options that the TUF B450, including ones for manual overclocking.

Cons:
– Fan stop for some reason only works when in DC mode and only with CHA_FAN headers. (Just, why?)
– It tries to install ASUS’s Armoury Crate bloatware unless you find and disable the BIOS setting.
– The amount of built-in RGB lighting is falsely advertised, only the ROG eye logo lights up.

Overall though, this is a great AM4 motherboard and in my opinion you likely can’t go wrong with it. I at least certainly haven’t experienced any serious issues with it.

Correspond parfaitement à la description et à mes attentes.
La qualité est au rendez-vous, l’utilisation est simple et le fonctionnement est exactement ce que je recherchais.
L’emballage était soigné et la livraison rapide.

Je recommande sans hésitation à toute personne qui cherche quelque chose de fiable et efficace.
Excellent rapport qualité-prix.

I received a faulty motherboard (only one ram channel works, wifi, Bluetooth, and encryption controller are all faulty). I contacted the manufacturer thinking that they would want the defective piece back and hoping they could send me a replacement right away, but the only offered to repair it. So, mail it to them, wait for repairs, then wait for them to mail it back, and hope nothing else is wrong with it!

So instead I returned it through Amazon. They shipped me a new one immediately AND I don’t have to send the current one back right away, just within the month! So now I can simply switch the boards out and not have PC guts all over my desk for who knows how long!

As far as the MB goes, I’ve been using ASUS products for years and they’ve always been good. This board comes with wonderful instructions as well – to compare, my son’s cheaper MB came with one page of double sided instructions, mostly pictures :/ Nice board, gorgeous, easy to install on.

The first one that I’ve received was broken but they send me a new one and yes it works it’s just an amazing motherboard so far
Idk if they are opened box or what was the other motherboard idk why it was broken.

good product