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

Overall this motherboard performs quite well. It has some nice modern features like onboard Wi-Fi 6, USBC compatible front panel connectivity, PCIE GEN4 x16, PCIE GEN4 M.2 (NVME), fan profiles, support for high-performance RAM speeds, overclocking, etc. all in the ITX -Housing. Most of these (and other) features work fairly well. My biggest motherboard problem has to do with the EFI boot manager. It "forgets" its boot records periodically. This is not uncommon on motherboards, as Rod Smith (rEFInd) describes in his online documentation on EFI bootloaders. It probably isn't a big deal for the average Windows user either, since the Microsoft bootloader is probably hardcoded as a secondary fallback bootloader. However, this is a disadvantage when using a dual-boot installation or a non-Windows operating system. As far as I can tell, the backup bootloader can catch this "forgetting" and restore the system. make bootable on reboot. However, this is quite annoying almost every time the system needs a cold boot. It also prevents certain boot process customizations. One of the few things that can be done to make such a motherboard work is to replace the backup bootloader (which normally shouldn't be touched) with an additional boot manager. I'm using rEFInd, but there are many other options that might work. I recommend reading Rod Smith's extensive online documentation on EFI boot managers if you have this problem as well. This is great reading if you want to better understand the modern boot process. I took a lot of it with me. I don't have a perfect understanding of the firmware, boot process, etc., but everything I learned suggested this was the problem. It doesn't appear to be an issue with the NVRAM itself as all other settings remain intact between reboots. I installed the latest firmware around July 2021 and the problem is still there. Again, I don't think this question will pose a problem for most users. If you only boot Windows on it, this motherboard could be a good choice.