ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (AMD AM4)

In our testing, the ASUS ROG Strix B550-F Gaming performed brilliantly in our system tests with the quickest POST time from any AM4 board we've tested with our Ryzen 3700X so far. The B550-F Gaming also had an impressive DPC latency result, with a massive advantage over other boards we've tested at default settings. In our CPU and game testing, the B550-F Gaming Wi-Fi was competitive. Our overclocking testing showed good results and tight VDroop control, with solid VRM thermals too. To put it mildly, the B550-F Gaming Wi-Fi has better VRM thermals than some X570 models costing double the price, which is a big win for ASUS here. For $190 with Wi-Fi, or $190 without, ASUS provides a lot of quality and performance for the money. It puts to bed the expectation that B550 motherboards can't be as good quality as the X570 series models. Despite users expecting cheaper prices of B550, vendors look to have made improvements to the quality of the PCB to make sure the PCIe 4.0 implementation is optimal. There are lower cost B550 options available, but ASUS has a firecracker in the B550-F Gaming Wi-Fi and provides a solid alternative to X570.

We spent a lot of time in the early pages of this review going over the ways in which the ASUS ROG Strix B550-F and B550-E are surprisingly different for two models just a letter apart in their nomenclature. Our time with them only emphasised how they feel quite apart from each other. We understand that feeling is a nebulous concept and without experience of all eight of our B550 launch motherboards they appear, in raw benchmark terms at least, too similar to be called different. Let us try and explain.