Performance

For testing, I have been saying for years that motherboard benchmarks don’t hold much weight because you are still using the same CPU, memory, and GPU and those are what play big roles in how fast your PC is. But I do run a few tests just to make sure everything is running the way it should and it also lets us see what the system can do. In this case, this is our first B550 board but I did want to see how it would compare with an X570 board so I included (and retested) our Crosshair VII Hero. There was some variation in my tests but only in PCMark 10 did I see results showing one faster than the other. The in game benchmarks were close together with both boards coming out ahead in different games. Altogether all of the tests just show how good the 3900X and 2080 SUPER are together.

The main tests that have some potential to have differences are the network tests because the boards are using different NICs. The Hero has the 2.5G Realtek RTL8125-CG and the B550-I has the I225-V 2.5Gb but they both ended up performing similarly. When it came to the wireless however the results had more variation which is ironic because both boards have the same Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless NIC. I think the antenna on our Hero is a little weak because I tested multiple times and was unable to get a better result on our WiFi 6 AP.

I also took a look at the VRM cooling. For this, I use the AIDA64 FPU stress test to heat things up and our FLIR to look at the thermals. This was a little more difficult with the B550-I because of the hidden heatsink. But I was able to peak in through the fan on top but the results may be a little less reliable because of that. Overall though what I found was the VRMs on the B550-I were running a lot hotter and given the small heatsink, this isn’t a big shock. The active cooling did however do a good job of cooling the heatsink down. If only there was a little more meat up over top of the VRMs to help pull the heat out into the heatsink.

I always take a look around to check out the board lighting as well but the B550-I doesn’t have any beyond the two RGB headers included on the board. There was however lighting inside of the three available audio jacks which makes recognizing where to plug and seeing where they are much easier.