Now might not be the best time in the world to a build a new PC, because of the silicon shortage, but if you're chomping (technically champing) at the bit anyway, ASRock's B550 Taichi Razer Edition motherboard is a good place to start. It's also on sale for $249.99 at Newegg right now.
That's $50 below its list price, and it partially addresses our only real complaint mentioned in our review—many X570 boards can be had for less. That's still true, though as far as more premium options go in B550 territory, this is not the most expensive board on Newegg. Ignoring marketplace sellers, that distinction belongs to the Asus ROG Strix B550-XE Gaming WiFi, which sells for $329.99.
Whether you should splurge on a higher end board from a budget chipset or a lower end board from a higher end chipset depends on what features you are after. Either way, it's worth noting that we consider the B550 Taichi Razer Edition one of the best B550 motherboards for gaming.
It looks sleek, for one thing, and of course offers ample RGB lighting. Beyond the aesthetics, however, it packs a generous assortment of premium features, such as a strong VRM to help with overclocking, a 2.5G LAN port and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) connectivity (both served by Killer), large heatsinks, and a fairly robust I/O with a USB Type-C case header thrown into the mix.
The board performed well in our tests, often leading other X570 and B550 boards in multi-threaded benchmarks. We also coaxed decent overclocking performance from this board, with a Ryzen 9 5950X CPU.
So yes, this is a based on AMD's budget chipset, but it offers a strong assortment of features of capabilities, now at a discount.
