MSI B550M PRO-VDH WiFi ProSeries Motherboard (AMD AM4, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA 6Gb/s, M.2, USB 3.2 Gen 1, AX Wi-Fi 6, D-SUB/HDMI/DP, Micro-ATX)

I used this motherboard for my first build, paired with the ryzen 5 5600x. The motherboard came with recent enough drivers to work with everything out of the box! There were a huge amount of rgb and fan connections, as well as whatever other things I needed in very convenient locations. The built in wifi is plenty fast; the lan is of course even faster. The only small problem is that it has only two Nvme ssd slots (usually not a problem but in my case it’s annoying). I got it on sale and would only recommend this motherboard as long as it’s on sale because the 130$ at the time of review is not quite worth it.

Seems to power but cannot take my cpu without bios flash and bios flash button is not working. Amazon support seem to say that there is an issue with the motherboard.

its only the 3rd one in 2 weeks that doesnt work

getting so tired of it so im returning everything tomorrow AGAIN. Got enough of playing russian roulette.. Seems like you never know what you are going to get when you order here.

so much time wasted. so much time having to return items and get new ones that doesn’t work.. They dont seem to test their component before reselling it.

been a computer IT guy for 30 years so i should know what im doing..

I’m so angry and tired.. my computer company is held hostage because I can’t get my new pc to work…There is always something, one component or another that doesn’t work, last week, it was the power supply, then it was the CPU, then it is the motherboard so got tired and re-ordered everything.. Now its the motherboard again that wont work… This is really getting on my nerves.

I dont mean to complain but there is a limit to people’s patience.

It’s a motherboard. It showed up working. There really isn’t much more you can ever say about any board, but here I go anyway.

Lots of RGB headers if you’re into that, but very few (good) USB headers.

The little lights it uses for debugging are neat, even if they provide extremely little information and a debug speaker would be better. Those little screens that display POST codes used by other companies would be even better, but take what you can get, at least it Has a speaker header, and the lights are useful for when things are so messed up you can’t get beep codes, and for just moving quickly when you get a code you aren’t familiar with.

Only actually came with the mounting hardware for one of the m.2 slots, which is a pretty serious problem when one of them is directly underneath your GPU and will be pulled out of the slot in the process of installing that GPU if not screwed down.

BIOS is extremely basic, in that confusing way where there are so few settings it’s hard to configure, and the version it ships with barely works; the toggle buttons for CSM/UEFI seem to show the one that’s active in white and the one that’s disabled in green or vice versa completely at random and don’t change when you click on them (so the only way to tell which is on is clicking that button then trying to leave the BIOS and checking the ‘do you want to save these settings’ popup), the same applies to the other buttons but sometimes they seem to toggle by just clicking some other part of the screen, if there’s an advanced mode that lets me deal with all the settings I’m used to from every other motherboard I’ve owned it is non-trivial to find, etc. If you buy this, the first thing you should do when you turn it on is flashing a new BIOS, though probably not the newest, couldn’t get the board to recognize that build at all, which should be a Huge Flashing Red Flag if you’re buying this for a Ryzen 5000 build. Oh, and to save others the time it took me to figure out, you may not be able to get it to recognize any of your drives as bootable without turning on CSM, I have literally no idea what that’s about but given the number of unresolved threads about people having that issue with this board you can find online, it seems to just be how this works.

Finally, here’s an Actual Problem rather than a criticism. It will not work for me with four sticks of RAM installed, even though that RAM is on its compatibility list and proven working (and corruption free, I’ve Memtested all of these for weeks at a time). It seems like a lot of boards on x570/b550 have problems handling completely filled DIMM slots, but with that board they weren’t guaranteed to work, and there’s no excuse on this one. Combined with the confusing and ineffectual BIOS the issue compounds, as the last time I was able to make things work by messing around with BIOS settings, a lot, while this time there are no settings to mess with. This is a real problem and I would not be surprised if it says something about the board’s underlying ability to handle memory properly.

TL;DR: It’s a good board, so long as you’re only using two DIMMs and don’t care much about the options this BIOS just does not have.

Great motherboard! Fits nicely inside our new Corsair Frame case. Lots of connectivity. I dont know much about pcs but it was easy enough for me and my 9yo to setup a pc and get it working.. with a little help from chatgpt 🙂

Bought this board for my sons build. Loved it so much I got one for my build. And another build after that. My daughter wants to transfer from laptop to desktop…so this board is my first pick.
3600 speed memory works perfectly. wifi 6 and bluetooth, pcie 4 and two nvme slots. Great board and worked all three out of the box for 5 series processors.

as soon as I was done installing this with a ryzen5 5000 it booted perfectly and after bios update for wifi fix i just had to plug it into a LAN and it automatically downloaded everything else this was my first motherboard swap couldn’t have gone any better