Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master
A luxurious B550 that makes some X570 motherboards look positively bland.
Say hello to the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master. It might ostensibly be based on a budget chipset, but this is no budget-oriented motherboard at $439. One look though and you’d never mistake it as such. You wouldn’t be alone in assuming that this was a good quality X570 board.
As expected, the Aorus Master easily features the best specification in the lineup. There’s plenty of fan and RGB headers, six SATA ports, debug LED and Gigabyte’s audio implementations are usually impressive like the one here. In the past Gigabyte really went all out on the RGB lighting, but this is a much more tasteful and mature design. Perhaps we have passed peak RGB!
It’s the only board in the roundup to feature three M.2 slots, all of which are equipped with heatsinks. Three M.2 slots isn’t a standard B550 feature and to achieve this the Aorus Master uses an interesting trick. If you use either of the bottom two M.2 slots, the primary PCIe slot drops back to 8x. This is still the equivalent of a 16x PCIe 3.0 slot, so we’re not too concerned about that. The B550 Master’s M.2 design erases the most significant limitation of the B550 chipset, which is the ability to run multiple PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives.
The quality of the VRM design really stands out. It packs in a genuine 16-phase 70a digital VRM powered by 8-pin and 4-pin power connectors. This is a board capable of powering any Ryzen CPU, whether it’s an overclocked 3950X or any future 4th Gen CPU. It’s cooled by Gigabyte’s trademark finned heatsink for maximum surface area and cooling efficiency. Top shelf stuff! Some X570 boards could learn a thing or two from this design.
The rear I/O is packed with loads of USB ports. There are no less than six USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (including one Type-C) and another six USB 2.0. Very impressive, although at this price a Gen 2x2 port would be welcome. At this level we’d like to have seen the inclusion of a DisplayPort and perhaps an additional LAN port, though with the inclusion of Wi-Fi 6, a second
LAN port won’t be a deal breaker for all but a few users. There’s a reason that all those $500+ X570 boards exist!
The Aorus Master performed as expected, though perhaps a tiny bit behind in a few too many tests. We often talk about how motherboard benchmarking usually doesn’t reveal too much, and anything within a one or two percent margin won’t show up anywhere but in benchmarks.
As we mentioned in the introduction, the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master is one of the most expensive of all B550 motherboards at $439, but it does pack features that wouldn’t be out of place on more expensive X570 boards. You get a hugely powerful VRM capable of heavy overclocking, load of USB ports, 2.5GbE and Wi-Fi6 and 3x M.2 slots (though with an asterisk as explained above). If you’re after a premium B550 motherboard, there’s not many that pack in more features than this. It’s a board that makes some more expensive X570 boards look cheap in comparison. The Aorus Master makes some X570 boards look rather basic though at $439, budget it isn’t.
“It’s the only board in the roundup to feature three M.2 slots, all of which are equipped with heatsinks.”