msiB550-A PRO ProSeries Motherboard (AMD Ryzen 5000, AM4, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA 6Gb/s, M.2, USB 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI/DP, ATX)

B550 mobos are made by many manufacturers. MSI usually makes good quality, high performance components. This is no excretion.B550 is a chipset. The boards built around it vary widely in quality and ports. I did a lot of research before selling on this one.The connections exist on this board are overkill, which is a great thing! I have over 23TB of storage across 6 drives (2 nVME, 2 SATA3 internal SSDs, 2 SATA3 HDDs for backups), an AIO CPU water cooler, a beefy vid card with high bus demands, etc. The only thing I had to install as a supplement is a 4x PCIe board with 2 more SATA3 plugs. The board has 6 on it, already. I needed 8. 6 is more then some other manufacturers put on their B550's.Very happy with this purchase. Getting very good performance in diagnostic testing. It runs cool. The chipset temp rarely goes above 32c even under heavy load, and this board is not water cooled. Pretty impressive.

Not the most expensive board, works great though. Has good audio options, and good connectivity (with 6 sata ports and a nice amount of PCIe slots). Worked out of the box with my new 5700x

So this is a great motherboard, but there is one flaw to this board. The M.2 slots are a bit wonky. They will both work, but right out of the box they might not. I spent probably a good week trying to figure out why my second NvME SSD wouldn’t work in the board. I was constantly tweaking BIOS setting to get it to show up (cause it didn’t even show up in the BIOS). After struggling for a week I decided to restore the settings in the BIOS. Once I did that and restarted the PC the second drive showed up. It may be that the settings out of the box were bad, but I can’t definitely say. So if that is the issue you’re having that is what I recommend to do as this is a great board for budget builders.

Good motherboard easy to update the bios with flash drive. Works good with my new Ryzen 7 5700x

I was going to update an MSI B450 mobo and put a 5800x in it but decided to upgrade to this B550 A-Pro. I figured since it's Gen 4 and has another M.2 slot it would be great. I was thinking it might need an update right out of the box for the 5800x, but really wasn't expecting the frustration ahead. All done with install, I pushed the power button and got the solid white cpu debug lite, and was locked out of even the bios screen. All fans spun, but no post, or video out to monitor. Then tried reseating ram, cpu, checking board power connectors, all w/no luck. Then researched and completed a no cpu bios flasback with latest bios. Thumbdrive flashed for a while then stopped, so I thought I licked it. Then I saw that it wasn't going to shut down for restart on it's own when it should have done so, so I forced shutdown. Long story short...after retrying posts unsuccessfully many times after bios flashing I had a 2700x on hand to install. No cpu debug now, but a vga one!!! Grrrrr..........I solved it by checking and reseating the power leads for the gpu, and it finally posted. Bios info confirmed the flash I did 4 hrs ago took, and was now up to date, but never posted until I put in the older cpu. Now...hear this M.S.I., both the B550 mobo and 5800x released at about the same time, in fact, about 6 mo. apart, so I shouldn't be having this issue. I then resolved to reinstall the 5800x on the chance of it working now, after the bios had got a full load-in and finalization. It did, thank God, 'cause if it hadn't it would've been disassembled and put right back in the box for RMA, despite the extra work and hassle. I've put together about 25 pc's but this turned into THE MOST frustrating build for me, eating 12 hours of my day for the full build, when normal may be 4-6 hrs. It's been a few days and it's run perfectly fine since that mess, but I'll think twice about ordering another MSI mobo.Update 11-14-2024Although I only gave 4 out of 5 rating at first, I would bump it up to a 4.75 if I could. Like many have said in reviews here, update the bios! The old BIOS that it shipped with really riled me up at the time, and luckily I had an old 2700x to get it to post before installing the 5800x. But I must say that after I got it running, finished set up and tweaked the settings, I haven't had any trouble at all. No crashes to speak of, and it's run beautifully. BIOS updates go smoothly and it now rocks a 5800x3d with the original 7900 XT gpu. It's turned out great, and I even went with another MSI mobo, a B650 Tomahawk Wi Fi. I'm happy with it now, but it also had it's issues, to say the least...like almost 2 minute post times. Google it. Most problems have smoothed out with BIOS updates now, but that's a whole other story in itself.

Works great. Needed a new motherboard so I could upgrade my graphics card and CPU. I don't think it came with screws, so I had to use the screws from my old motherboard.

The motherboard was easy to install in my existing system case upgrading the processor, memory, and dGPU. Installed a Ryzen 9 5900, 64GB DDR4-3200, 1TB M.2 2080 PCIe 4x4 SSD, and an RTX 4070 in one system. The other system was a Ryzen 9 3900, 32GB DDR4-3200, 512GB M.2 2080 PCIe3x4 SSD, and an RTX 4070. There's a heat-spreader for the M.2!It requires some patience on first boot since the FW seems to "think" a long time without writing to the screen, but it eventually came to the BIOS splash screen. I did update the BIOS to the latest version right away since the shipping version was outdated (may have been fine but why take chances). The BIOS update procedure is simple--just download, unzip to a connected drive, boot to the UEFI BIOS, go to update BIOS mode, reboot, and point to the BIOS file on the connected drive. The update process will finish up and the system will reboot. I did have to set the memory speed to the profile to support its speed--it did not automatically choose the correct JDEC/XMP profile for 1600MHz/3200MT/s.After installing Windows 11 Pro and my application/utility suites, the system has been stable through some very heavy use: transcoding videos with CPU and GPU using Handbrake, creating/editing videos using DaVinci Resolve, editing photos with Lightroom/ACR/Photoshop, and running a range of development and productivity applications. CPU-z confirms that PCIe is running at Gen4 speeds, and the memory is running at the correct profile/speed.In all, the motherboard is a good value for the performance and stability that it delivers.