GIGABYTE B550I AORUS Pro AX (Rev. 1.0) (AMD AM4)

Von den großen ATX-Ablegern wechseln wir nach den letzten Tests auf das kleinere Mini-ITX-Format, bleiben jedoch zunächst bei AMDs B550-Chipsatz. Mit den kleinen Platinen lassen sich nicht nur sehr kompakte Gaming-Systeme kreieren, sondern auch das Thema Overclocking hat bei vielen Anwendern in diesem Bereich eine große Bedeutung. Genau ein solcher Kandidat kann das Gigabyte B550I AORUS Pro AX sein, das wir uns nun näher anschauen wollen.

Focusing on the GIGABYTE B550I Aorus Pro AX, and GIGABYTE has a pretty competitive offering for the mini-ITX crowd; in a trifecta of ways, including price, performance, and spec. The only PCIe 4.0 limitations to B550 on ITX are those that include two PCIe M.2 slots like this one, with one operating at PCIe 4.0 and the other reverting PCIe 3.0. The CPU drives the full-length PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, and that both NVIDIA and AMD have been consistently pushing users away from multi-card setups, which of course, mini-ITX isn't compatible with. Other storage options include four SATA ports, all with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays as per AMD specification, and GIGABYTE has done a good job at utilizing space around the board.

The Gigabyte B550I AORUS Pro AX is a well built, practical board with great features, including 2.5 Gb/s LAN, a top-shelf VRM, and an integrated I/O shield. When it comes to looks, the Gigabyte B550I AORUS Pro AX may not turn heads like some more flashy designs, but the neutral gray and black theme of the B550 AORUS Pro has an appeal of its own that easily fits almost any build.

The Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX Motherboard gets a huge thumbs up from me before it even went on the test bench. It’s mini-ITX and that’s honestly a very rare thing these days. Most of the brands put out mostly ATX, and maybe one mini-ITX. If we’re lucky, we may see an mATX too, but those are even rarer than new mini-ITX models these days. Not for AORUS though, they’ve given us the premium mini-ITX board I’ve been waiting for. Plus, they’ve really crammed in a LOT of cool features and premium hardware, ensuring it can keep up with its full-size ATX counterparts.

Dare I say it, with motherboards this good and diverse incl PCIe gen 4.0 support, who needs X570? That said, pricing is the trivial point here as Gigabyte just overloaded this motherboard with premium features., but at 179 I am absolutely not disappointed. Dual M2 slots, WIFI6, and 2.5 GigE are some of the premium features. Then there's the single M2 shield and of course, the sheer performance as B550 on that processor and feature level runs as fast as the more expensive X570 boards.

We've used the word compromise a lot when discussing the B550 chipset. Partly because any time a company produces a more affordable take on a big chipset they've had to cut some stuff out to make the pricing work, and partly because the results have been so good across the board that we often wonder where exactly those compromises come.