AMD B550 chipset
Last year, AMD introduces the X570 chipset, bringing PCIe 4.0 to high end motherboards. With PCIe 4.0, you get faster bandwidth not only to the graphics card, NVME will benefit the fast lane of access.
AMD B550 chipset which is targetting the main stream desktop market.
The B550 chipset now brings PCIe 4.0 to the mainstream desktop motherboards. You can now enjoy the same fast graphics performance and NVME access similar to the X570 chipset.
The previously Dual GPU support only on X470 and X570 is now made available on the B550 chipset too.
There is also PCIe 3.0 general purpose lanes which were previously PCe 2.0 on the AMD 400 series chipsets.
It supports the upcoming 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen desktop processors but it doesn’t support the Ryzen 3000 series APU and earlier processors. Most importantly, it is Zen 3 ready.
So will you buy a B550 board or a X570 motherboard ?
A number of manufacturers have indicated that they will launch new motherboards based on this new chipset. They will be available from 16 June 2020.
AMD Socket AM4 Motherboard Chipset Solutions
| AMD Athlon™ Processors with Radeon Graphics | 1st Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors | 1st Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors with Radeon™ Graphics | 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors | 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors with Radeon™ Graphics | 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors | Future AMD Ryzen™ Desktop Processors With the ‘Zen 3’ Architecture | |
| Compatible with | Compatible with | Compatible with | Compatible with | Compatible with | Compatible with | Compatible with | |
| X570 | X | X | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| B550 | X | X | X | X | X | ✓ | ✓ |
| X470 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Selective Beta BIOS update needed |
| B450 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Selective Beta BIOS update needed |
| X370 | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Selective Beta BIOS update needed | X |
| B350 | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Selective Beta BIOS update needed | X |
| A320 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | X | X |