Review on 🖥️ MSI B550-A PRO ATX Motherboard (AMD AM4, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA 6Gb/s, M.2, USB 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI/DP) by Brandon Mcvey

From my point of view, this motherboard offers excellent value for money without compromise. It has everything you need like USB-C Gen 3.2, USB headers, NVMe dual drive support, DP, HDMI, decent audio chip (if you still use it), great 10-phase VRM with a good one heatsink. Also a good NVMe drive layout with no heat dissipation from the graphics card like some motherboards. I paired this MSI B550-A PRO board with Ryzen 9 5900x, 16GB Crucial 3600, Crucial P5 NVMe drive, MSI RX550 4GB graphics card (non-gamer), EVGA SuperNova 450GM 80+ Gold PSU, Scythe Fuma 2 cooler. This combination worked great, very efficient and powerful. First I bought ASRock B550M-Pro4 which has almost all these functions + Wi-Fi card interface. I liked that it had these features and bought it. It turns out that the VRM isn't very good at this, it overheats and causes a thermal choke in the stress test. It also turned out that this MB is very inefficient compared to the MSI board. My previous setup was an MSI board with an Intel K series, so the bios seems familiar to me aside from AMD's specific overclock settings. I received this board due to an ASRock VRM throttling issue. The MSI board has a very good 10-phase VRM and a good heatsink to keep it cool. ASRock idled at 58-60W with the display on with the above setting, while the MSI B550-A PRO idled at 27-28W. That's right, 30W+ difference between the two boards for the same setup/components. I went back and checked the ASRock settings and used the same settings. When I increased the FCLK to 1800, the ASRock board increased to 72W when idle. To be honest, increasing the speed of the memory, the XMP setting does not matter, it is the FCLK bus settings. I tested the same with MSI and when I increased the FCLK setting above 1600 the standby power increased by about 12-14W in standby. So I'm not sure if the CPU needs more power at higher FCLK above 1600 , but it seems terrible, only for idling on a bus above 1600. Also, the MSI B550-A PRO's VRM works fine and never had a problem. I slightly increased the CPU load using increased PPT, EDC, TDC limits and the Curve optimizer to get the best result without excessive heat. Now all cores hit 4600MHz (all 12 cores) in most tests, but in the long stress test they drop to the 4000-4200 range compared to the default settings which used to drop to 3600 or even lower. Check out some of the reviews above, not the best but pretty good I would say. I wish I could use the Noctua D15 for cooling instead of the Fuma 2. It's not that the Fuma 2 is bad, it runs smooth and cool on default settings. See temperatures above, CPU idle temp at 35°C and the same with VRM. But during overclocking, the cooler doesn't scale well for additional heat transfer, so we had to limit performance. I tried adding more powerful fans but the difference was only 1-2 degrees, not that much. But I'm satisfied, it's very quiet. On full stress test it reaches 85-87°C (AIDA64, OCCT), Prime 95 is 75-76°C, all at maximum heat for the stability/temperature test. I wish the AIDA was under 80 in the stress test. All this in a 15 year old Antec case (but much better quality with thicker steel), a front fan, an exhaust fan. Completely inaudible at idle. and normal use. (You must keep your ear 2-3 inches away from the case to hear). But when the cores are at 100% full load, like when transcoding, the fans run at full blast, we can hear it from 3 feet away. Final Configuration MSI B550-A Pro MB+ Ryzen 9 5900x+ Crucial 16GB Dual Channel 3600 Crucial P5 500GB NVMe Hynix 1TB SSD MSI RX550 4GB Graphics Card Asus Bluray Writer 2 x 120mm Case Fans (Scythe) Devices -SD card reader with EVGA SuperNOVA 450GM, consumes about 29-30W in standby mode. All in all I can recommend this motherboard.