Mini- ITX PC cases are becoming more and more popular these days and manufacturers have sure taken this into account by paying more attention to their mini-ITX products. Today, the first AMD B550 Mini-ITX board we got for review is none other than the Gigabyte B550i AORUS PRO AX. It has an 6 + 2 phase VRM design paired with 90A MOSFETs, which means this will easily handle higher core count CPU and overclocking. This board also features the latest 2.5 GbE LAN and Wi-Fi 6 for internet connection. The overall design language leans more towards minimalism. Those who like ARGB lighting would be please to know that there are adjustable ambient LEDs underneath the motherboard’s right side. With that said, let’s take a closer look at it, shall we?
▲This means that if you wish to use any PCIe Gen 4 graphics card or PCIe Gen 4 SSD, you will be limited to the PCIe Gen 4 x 16 that the CPU provides as the B550 chipset only provides Gen 3 lanes by itself.
▲Here’s the usual e-sport stylized box with the mighty AORUS eagle on top that we’ve come to expect from Gigabyte.
▲Here’s a look at the back of the box where Gigabyte present some of the motherboard features in a neat manner.
▲The box also include an instruction booklet, a driver disk, a 4 pin PWM fan splitter cable, Wi-Fi antenna, an ARGB connector cable, a SATA cable and a M.2 screw.
▲The VRM heatsink heatpipe extend all the way to the B550 chipset heatsink to help with the cooling. We can see Gigabyte used a multi layer cover design on the IO and M.2 SSD area to add some stylish accent to the motherboard. Gigabyte also reinforced both the ram slots and PCIe x 16 slot with armor for extra durability.
▲We can see the metal backplate adds some much needed structural support to an otherwise pretty standard 17 x 17cm mini-ITX board. There’s also a PCIE 3.0 x4/x2 here which also can be run in SATA mode M.2 slot on the back.
▲The 2 reinforced DDR4 DIMM slots support dual-channel RAM kits with a capacity up to 64GB, and frequency up to 4866 Mhz.
▲Like we mentioned before, there’s a row of ARGB LED that offer accent lighting on the right side of the board which can be controlled via RGB FUSION 2.0. There are also other RGB and ARGB headers on-board for additional RGB light strip.
Windows 10 Pro 64bit 1909
NVIDIA Driver 445.87
The CPU runs at stock settings
XMP is enabled on the RAM
Ambient temperature: 29C
UAC – off
Windows Defender – off
Screen saver – off
Power plan – High performance
Hibernate mode - off
▲In our AIDA64 2 hour stress test, the CPU die temperature averaged around 80.6C.
▲During our AIDA64 2 hour stress test, the VRM heat sink near the I/O hit 42.6 C.
Gigabyte BIOS offer an easy and an advance mode for easy, painless and in-depth tweaking of your components. The AORUS themed easy mode is quite intuitive. It’s been here as a staple since when the X570 motherboards was released. We suggest folks to get familiar with it since it is an easy way to make some quick changes to your system.
We only have high praises for the AORUS B550I PRO AX. The surprisingly beefy 6 + 2 phase VRM design paired with 90A MOSFET is nothing to be scoffed at. The board also handle memory overclocking like a champ, with support up to 5200Mhz.
It is also build like a fighter jet, with reinforced PCIe slot, RAM slot and metal back plate for structural support.
The board will easily handle APUs with its 3 display output (1 Displayport, 2 HDMI).
Gigabyte market this board as an high-end ITX board and this certainly delivers on every aspect.
UH wholeheartedly recommend this board to mini-ITX AM4 platform enthusiasts !
English ver. editor：XMA
