ASUS ROG Strix B550-I Gaming AM4 Motherboard Review

Under the Hood

Given the small form-factor, there isn’t much to remove from ASUS’s ROG Strix B550-I Gaming. A couple of screws hold the rear I/O cover in place. With this removed, we find a VRM cooling fan and the CMOS battery stuck to the top of the LAN port.

A couple more screws hold the VRM heatsink assembly in place. The cooling fan uses incredibly small wires, all 4 together are smaller than a single wire on most case fans, use caution if you need to mess with this.

Ten Vishay SiC639 50A integrated power stages, eight for core voltage, and 2 more for SoC voltage.

An ASP1106 digital VRM controller hides on the rear of the board. This controller can run at a 4+2 configuration for Vcore and VSoC. To meet the current requirements needed, ASUS runs two 50power stages per phase for Vcore.

An ITE66317FN Re-timer Buffer provides the HDMI 2.0 port on the rear I/O from a compatible APU.

An ASMedia ASM1543 handles the channel switching required for the USB Type-C on the back panel I/O. A Few Pericom P13EQX redrivers help the rear USB 3.1 ports provide a strong signal.

The 32MB Winbond BIOS chip sits next to the NuvoTon Super I/O near the chipset.

A single memory phase is driven from a Texas Instruments TPS543B20 25A Synchronous Converter.

Intel’s I225-V 2.5Gb Ethernet Controller hides on the rear of the motherboard.