MSI - B550 GAMING PLUS (Socket AM4) AMD B550 ATX DDR4 Motherboard - Black

I have decided to upgrade the internals of my old desktop PC. I needed a quality B550 ATX motherboard that didn't break the bank. So, I went with the MSI B550 Gaming Plus. I purchased and picked up the motherboard from Best Buy, and brought it home. No damage was found on the board itself or the additional parts that were included. I installed a Ryzen 3600, Cooler Master Hyper 220 EVO Black, 2 stick of 8gb DDR4 3200mhz Corsair RAM, Gigabyte GTX 1060 Mini OC, and a Samsung 970 EVO 500gb NVME SSD to the build. The CPU works right of the box as specified. I installed a distro of arch linux on the 970 EVO, and it manages to run with very little to no issue as of today. I connected a Samsung 860 EVO 250gb SSD to use as my Windows 10 drive. The BIOS works as intended, and I am able to run a functioning dual OS system (F11 to chose the desired drive at startup). I haven't done much with overclocking other than running my RAM at 3200mhz. I am yet to manually overclock my CPU and GPU, but I have no need as of late. Overall, I have not encountered any hardware or software issues specifically related to the motherboard itself. I am very satisfied with my purchase.

The MSI B550 GAMING PLUS is a great motherboard, it has many features that I look for with motherboards in its price range, such as: a S/PDIF port, built-on IO shield, BIOS flash button, and multiple m.2 slots. Another thing I like about this motherboard is how they placed the sys_fan 1 and 2 headers to be closer together. The motherboard supported my Ryzen 5000 series processor without needing to flash the bios. The main reason I purchased this board was to run my Ryzen 9 5900x, as I tried doing so with a B450 Tomahawk Max and it could only handle it when it was undervolted to 1.2v. The MSI B550 Gaming Plus runs the 5900x without the undervolt I needed and gives me overclocking headroom due to the improved VRMs over the Tomahawk Max. I am using this motherboard with: CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900x Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240mm AIO GPU: PowerColor Red Dragon RX 6800 RAM: 16GB Team T-Force Vulcan Z @ 3200 Mhz PSU: Super Flower Leadex III 850w 80+ Gold Case: Corsair iCUE 220T Storage: Seagate 2TB 7.2K HDD, 240GB Inland Professional SSD Overall, the MSI B550 Gaming Plus is an excellent choice for anyone in the market for a Ryzen 5000 compatible motherboard that is fairly priced.

I don’t think you can ask for much more out of this board for the price. It might not be the best board out there but what you get for what you pay is a lot. It has many of the same features as the MSI MPG X570 and actually looks very similar. You get the same supported memory speed of 4400 MHz, M.2 gen 4x4 and PCI-E 4x16. You get a lot of fan headers. I think there my be one more than an X570 or at least as many. What you are lacking from the MSI MPG X570 (WiFi version) is Bluetooth, built in WiFi, a second PCI-E 4x16, one less PCI-E 3.0x1 slot and a few less USB 3.2 ports. I think the overclocking capability is less because the X570 has an additional 4 plug power connector on the board and this does not. Once you get used to the BIOS configuration or MSI it’s not hard to navigate, I actually like it. So all in all if you can do without the features this board is lacking compared to the X570 this B550 is great. If not spend a little more and upgrade. This is my second MSI motherboard and I’m happy with both. No problems, they both booted up on first start with no issues. The manual that comes with the board is very detailed and helps with installation. You just get the board, manuals, a software installation cd (most likely not needed) and a couple of sata cables in the box so make sure you get whatever else you need to install.

It’s a good motherboard and great price. I was a newbie building my pc. I was able to watch a video while building my pc and everything was pretty straightforward with the motherboard. Only complaint is that the cpu power port is slightly unconventionally in the top left. I did my psu cables at the end so it was kind of hard to get the cable in when lot of my other parts were already in like aio and gpu. I recommend connecting that cpu power cable in before moving forward with other parts. Regardless, I got the cable in and my system ran smoothly on first try. The rgb on the board is a bit more subtle than I’d like. Still looks really nice in my system though!

Great motherboard with a lot of features (sadly no wifi or bluetooth). Easy to work with and looks nice, but a little pricy for its functionality, although thats made up for with its extra slots.