Review on 🎮 GIGABYTE B550 AORUS Master: Feature-packed Gaming Motherboard with WiFi 6, Triple M.2, USB 3.2 Gen 2, and RGB Fusion 2.0 by Peter Caw

great for overclocking, but I've had some serious issues with the gigabyte BIOS. I've updated, returned, and updated my BIOS probably five times since purchase. I strongly recommend updating the BIOS to F11n (I warn you, this is a beta version), otherwise you will probably have problems with the USB controller randomly turning off or not turning on at all after POST. The F11n seems to have solved this problem, but I also had some issues with the screen flashing pink initially but flashing red briefly on the Windows logon screen after updating the BIOS - I've replaced every other component on my board, to try to solve this problem, so I'm convinced it's a motherboard problem. It's not a big problem, but I'm concerned that this board will fail after a while. I don't really have anything other than a weird issue with my screen to back this up, but if it dies or takes other components with it I'll update this review. after replacing my RX 5700 XT graphics card with an old R9 380X it doesn't seem to show up anymore but I got a replacement RX 5700 XT from Amazon to test and see if it works and lo and behold, she worked. This leads me to believe that there is a hardware issue with the PCIe Gen 4.0 graphics cards and this motherboard. Setting the PCIe generation to 3.0 didn't seem to help, so it could very well be a firmware issue. I'm really a bit confused here. Gigabyte's RGB Fusion software is extremely buggy and, once installed, effectively disables my ability to adjust the lighting on my Sapphire Nitro+ graphics card. a bit of a hassle, so I just uninstalled RGB Fusion and tweaked my lighting with my GPU's own software. Much of Gigabyte's software in general is junk, feels and looks dated, and uses an outdated, almost 2008 GUI. Draft. But the interesting thing is that you can still use Face-Wizard through the @BIOS application and it works fine as long as you use 4:3 .bmp images. this is interesting because Gigabyte hasn't supported this software for ten years. very strange that they buried it in their @BIOS application. Another problem I encountered is the built-in Wi-Fi/Bluetooth adapter. The antenna itself is pretty good, looks decent, and has a magnetic base so it can be mounted behind a case or other metal surface. However, it happened to stop working in older BIOS versions. F11n seems to have fixed this as well, but Gigabyte doesn't mention that the updated BIOS fixes this issue. very strange. thermals are excellent; massive VRM heatsink, and the motherboard has a huge backplate, which makes it strong and prevents deformation, and provides additional heat dissipation, and makes the motherboard very high quality. Please note that since it uses the AMD B550 chipset, you can use multiple M.2 SSDs in Gen 4 mode, but you have to sacrifice PCIe x16 bandwidth. After installing a second M.2 drive, your bandwidth in your x16 slot is reduced to x8 - the chipset doesn't have as many lanes as the premium X570 board. I don't think most people will have this problem or notice it. x8 is still a good bandwidth for a current generation graphics card without significant performance degradation. All in all this is a quality motherboard with some weird quirks which according to posts on the forums are an ongoing quality control issue with Gigabyte AORUS, but I've also heard it could be an issue with the AMD B550 chipset drivers and incomplete support by the silicon developer side. Gigabyte support has been slow to respond to these issues with conflicting answers online, so this is up in the air at the moment. This board truly offers some of the best thermal performance and power management of any B550 board, even outperforming most mid-range and entry-level X570 boards. The onboard sound chip is of fairly high quality and the VRMs are great for overclocking, but the issues this board has to deal with don't make it a strong recommendation.