Review on 🎮 ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/AX: High-Performance Motherboard for 3rd Gen AMD AM4 Ryzen and Future Ryzen Processors by Zachary Ester

I bought this motherboard to assemble with the NZXT H1 case. Here are the pros and cons. Pros: - The front USB-C connector is full-speed Gen2 (10Gbps), while competing motherboards use cheaper half-speed Gen1 connectors. - The audio driver on ASRock website is Realtek Universal Audio Driver (UAD). the terrible Realtek HD Audio (HDA) driver. In combination with the high-quality Realtek 1220 audio chip, this means excellent sound quality. Excellent WiFi and Bluetooth support with BT 5.0 and 802.11ax WiFi. Wi-Fi is particularly fast (I get 400Mbps in, 90Mbps out, and 7ms ping on the speed test, as does my iPhone, so I'm pretty sure my router is the limiting factor). VRM seems to be the best of all B550. ITX board if you like that kind of thing. - Lots of really great features, all in all just a really good choice! Cons (mostly just minor things): - Visibility is ugly - Antenna build quality is terrible. It's made out of extremely cheap plastic and falls apart with a little shake, and instead of magnets, it has adhesive that sticks only once on the back. At the same time, its speed is excellent. I bought a second antenna and didn't notice any speed increase. - No Clear CMOS button on the I/O panel. To clear the CMOS you need to jump over two pins located under the graphics card. Since I'm using a vertical cable in my case, this isn't a problem, but in some cases you'll definitely need to remove the graphics card. SATA connectors are arranged at right angles. This is a big problem for smaller cases, especially considering the board only comes with a right-angle SATA cable. Be sure to connect the SATA cables before installing the motherboard. The LEDs can only be configured via a nasty Windows application and cannot even be disabled via the BIOS. By default, they pulse like a rainbow, which is annoying (why not disable them by default?) At the time of writing this review, this hadn't been fixed, but ASRock really should be able to handle it. There aren't many ports on the back - 4 USB 3.0, 1 USB 3.1, and 1 USB-C, plus the standard 3.5mm jacks, LAN, and display cables. That's not a problem for me, but if you're looking for SPDIF or additional USB ports, keep that in mind. Title. But there are some issues that make me rate this 4 stars instead of 5.