Better late than never. According to VideoCardz (via Wccftech), AMD’s budget-oriented B550 motherboards will finally be released this summer, on June 16. That would be nearly a year after AMD launched the X570 chipset – its more expensive, higher-ended counterpart.
B550 boards will, of course, cost significantly less. “The AMD B550 chipset motherboards would fall somewhere between $80 to $150 US considering that the cheapest X570 options are available for around $150 US,” Wccftech speculated. “The AMD X470 motherboards still carry good support for Ryzen 3000 CPUs and start for around $120-$130 US if you can still find them in the retail channel. B450 chipset based motherboards can be found pretty cheap for around $60-$80 US.”
One of the biggest features that X570 motherboards introduced was support for PCIe 4.0, which doubled bandwidth from 32 GBps to 64 GBps. That improvement is reportedly carrying over to the B550 boards. (The OEM-specific B550A motherboards also support PCIe 4.0 to some extent, but these are stuck with last generation’s B450 chipset.)