Over the past year, we’ve review a plethora of B550 motherboards from ASRock. There’s the ASRock B550 Taichi, ASRock B550 Extreme4, ASRock B550M Steel Legend, and most recently, the ASRock B550 TAICHI – RAZER EDITION. All of the motherboards mentioned above offeres good performance, excellent value for money, and an amazing list of features.
Today, we will be taking a look at ASRock’s latest addition to their range B550 motherboard series, the B550 PG Riptide featuring the much loved B550 chipset. It’s compatible with AMD Ryzen 3000, 4000 G-Series and 5000 series of desktop processors, and supports memory speeds of up to DDR4 4933+ (OC).
It comes with 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 Slot for graphics card, 2 x PCIe 3.0 x16 Slots, 1 x PCIe 3.0 x1 Slot, as well as 1 x M.2 Key-E for WiFi. For storage, there’s a total of 6 x SATA ports, 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4 x4), 1 x Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA3) for SSDs. And for connectivity, you get 3 x USB 3.2 Gen2 (Front Type-C, Rear Type-A+C), 10 x USB 3.2 Gen1 (4 Front, 6 Rear), 8 x USB 2.0 (6 Front, 2 Rear), and finally the Killer E3100X 2.5GB LAN.
Of course, not to mention ASRock’s unique features which includes the 10 Phase, Digi Power, Dr. MOS, and of course, the 7.1 CH HD Nahimic Audio, as well as ASRock’s PolyChrome Sync.
What’s interesting about this motherboard is that it comes with a pair of Lightning Gaming Ports which are designed for die hard gamers and enthusiasts. Nice! What’s more, you also get ASRock’s unique Graphics Card Holder, which allows you to install a range of large but heavy graphics card into your system. It supports the weight of the card by mounting the end on to the holder, and thus reducing the ugly sag.
From what I can gather, the B550 PG Riptide is aimed at the budget conscious gamer. And this is evident as the motherboard lack certain features which are usually found on more higher-end models … such as dual x16 PCIE 4.0 slots, diagnostic LEDs, onboard power-on/reset switches, a larger I/O hood and beefier heatsinks.
Having said that, it doesn’t mean the B550 PG Riptide will perform poorly … quite the opposite. The B550 is a very capable chipset, and from previous reviews of the ASRock’s B550 motherboards, I’m expecting the B550 Riptide to perform just as good as any B550 motherboard out there.
I would like to thank ASRock for providing the review sample. This is a snippet from what ASRock has to say about themselves on their website:
ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.
ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.
We’ll be testing the motherboard using our Ryzen 5 5600X featuring 6 cores/12 threads, 16GB of Adata XPG Spectrix D60G RGB DDR4-3600, along with Gigabyte’s Aorus 500GB PCIE Gen4 SSD. I’m expecting the results to be similar to other B550 motherboards and it should compete quite well against the X570 too.
OK, let’s dig right in and and start by taking a look at the specifications and features in our next page. At the time of review we didn’t see any MSRP for the ASRock B550 PG Riptide motherboard, however you can buy something similar … the ASRock B550 PG Velocita for around USD $185 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/38bmurl
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