Closer Look
Biostar B550M-Silver arrived in a retail package which is a well-described, flat box. The front suggests that the motherboard is from the Racing and Silver series. Inside the box is a well-protected motherboard, SATA data cables, user’s manual, IO shield, and driver’s DVD. Let’s say that nothing unusual but still enough to install our new motherboard.
The motherboard has a pretty standard design compared to other gaming series. There are no components that could significantly raise the price, but we still can see quite large heatsinks and a robust power design. The missing things on the first look are M.2 SSD heatsinks and a WiFi controller. Both are not a big problem but are worth mentioning.
The motherboard is in micro ATX format what means it will be smaller than a regular ATX motherboard. Still, because of the typical design of motherboards with the B550 chipset, we can connect about as many devices.
The B550M-Silver is equipped with 10-power phases and handles all available processors from the Ryzen 5000 series without issues. We had no problems during the tests with the Ryzen 5900X processor. The same, RAM compatibility is pretty good, and considering that most AMD users stick with the Gear 1 mode, the limiting factor will be the processor’s memory controller. Typically, we can set anything between DDR4-3600 and DDR4-4000 using Gear 1 mode.
Biostar software supports various devices using ARGB/RGB illumination without issues. In the below photos, you can see how it looks on the test rig.
On the next page, we will look at the BIOS/UEFI.
