GIGABYTE B550M AORUS ELITE AM4 AMD B550 Micro-ATX Motherboard with DDR4, Dual M.2, PCIe 4.0, Realtek GbE LAN

Pros: Biggest pro: This is one of a very few, if not the only motherboard for Joe Consumer that allows RAID for three (Generation 4) M.2 drives without a lane bottleneck between the chipset and the CPU.

Cons: Biggest con: Starting with the installation of a second M.2 drive, the PCIe x16 slot for the video card loses 8 of its 16 paths. You can’t have your 12 CPU paths for 3 drives and your 16 paths for video too.

Overall Review: Here are some notes concerning my recent real-life experience to date.

My B550 Aorus Master motherboard has been working fine ever since the very first time it was paired up with an adequate power supply. A minimum of three power connectors from the power supply is most definitely required: the usual 1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector, a 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector, and a 1 x 4-pin ATX 12V power connector. The last socket could be supplied from ½ of a second 2 x 4-pin (8-pin) ATX12V. Repeat: For this motherboard, your power supply must have all 3 specifically designated ATX 12V outputs just to power up the motherboard.
My CPU is an AMD 3700X with 8 cores (a Ryzen 7 Generation 3 running @ the stock 3.6 GHz). Both it and the motherboard support PCIe Generation 4 devices which are pretty much next-level stuff. Speed-wise, this CPU is pretty much equivalent to my old Intel except that this one has 2 more cores and it only burns 65 watts. On the other hand, my old Intel setup supported quad channel vs. AMD’s dual channel. The new 3700X is running flawlessly.
I started out using my older 4 x 4GB of DDR4-2400, CL14-14-14-34, 1.2V. After a test run, I replaced the older memory with new 2 x 8GB of DDR4-3600, CL16-16-16-36, 1.35V. Both sets of memory used standard XMP Profiles. After the memory upgrade, I did not notice a significant increase in performance at the user level with regard to speed. I can comfortably say that I overspent on new memory.
I also started out using my older (Generation 3) NVMe PCIe M.2 drives. They are already pretty snappy. They seemed to be just as fast as my previous setup of 5 (ea.) SATA SSD drives in RAID 0. After another test run, I replaced the older M.2 PCIe system drive (Samsung 960 EVO, Generation 3) with a new drive (FireCuda 520, Generation 4). At the user level, the new FireCuda Gen.4 does seem to be quicker. However, for business use it’s not yet really a “have-to-have” game-changer. I still have to wait during virus-checking and while doing backups.
My next/last upgrade experience with this particular setup will begin next week after 2 more Generation 4 drives arrive. My goal is to stripe all 3 Generation 4 drives into a RAID 0. This will maximize the read and write speeds at the expense of 8 lanes/paths to the 16-lane video card. My (x16) video card has been operating fine in the new (x8) mode, but I’m only looking at business screens which are relatively static on my display. I am not concerned with frame rates, the highest resolution, mist/fog, ray tracing, and as such. However, soon I will be expecting some really, really, really snappy talking between the CPU and the storage. At this time (Aug. 2020), there does not seem to be a faster read/write option available out there for Joe Consumer.
If you made it this far, I hope it helps you.

Pros: Product works great except for one major thing.

Cons: The product is supposed to have an Intel Wifi adapter. This is wrong. Either due to a part swap at the manufacturer, or sometime afterwards, the adapter was swapped out for a Mediatek MT7921K. As a result, the Wifi will not work when installing the motherboard, because the expected Intel drivers off the Gigabyte website are incorrect, they will not work. I had to separately download the Mediatek drivers after asking for others to assist with what exactly was wrong who informed me of the Mediatek swap. If anyone has this issue, please go download the Mediatek MT7921K drivers off Lenovo's website, as they resolved the issue.

Overall Review: The board works great, but this kind of quality control failure is a major red flag for me, especially considering Mediatek's adapter is considered inferior to Intels. This needs to be resolved, and it caused me several hours of frustration banging my head trying to figure out why the Intel drivers refused to work. Image shows the hardware ID of the network controller which identifies it as Mediatek.