Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

With support for the latest AM4 3rd Gen CPUs, you’ll need plenty of power. The board features an 8 Phases Digital VRM design, with an impressive 90A Smart Power Stage configuration. The board comes well equipped with 3 fan headers and 5 temperature sensors with Fan Stop support. There’s also a line of RGB lights down the right edge of the board, as well as headers for Addressable and standard RGB hardware.

The rear IO shield is actually a big extended heatsink and guard. This will help maintain lower temperatures on the power delivery hardware. Furthermore, they’ve expanded that with a large heat pipe that goes into a lower heatsink which sits over the M.2 mounts.

Power comes from a single 8-pin at the top of the motherboard, and they’ve snuck in the CPU fan header here too.

Towards the bottom of the motherboard, you can see the design on that fantastic M.2 and VRM combo heatsink. What’s really cool is that it’s hiding an M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 slot under there so you can reap those Gen4 speeds. Tucked into the corner, you’ll find the ALC1220-VB chipset, as well as the Nichicon capacitors.

Along the bottom of the motherboard, you’ll find the 16x PCIe slot, which also offers up the latest Gen 4 support. Of course, as you can see, it’s also armoured to better support the weight of modern GPUs. Plus, they’ve armoured the DIMM slots so the board doesn’t bend and flex.

The rear of the motherboard is fully armoured, which is once again paired up with the heatsinks on the front to extended the overall cooling support.

There’s also a neat little cut-out here to allow for yet another M.2 drive, which is fantastic!

The rear I/O shield is pre-installed, offering up two HDMI outputs and a single DisplayPort. You get a few USB ports, including Type-C, and fast networking thanks to the 2.5 GbE LAN and WiFi 6.