B450 vs B550: Which chipset should you choose?

While the AM4 socket is on its way ou as AMD releases CPUs on their new AM5 platform, it's still a plenty powerful platform that many gamers will choose to build with. Today, we'll compare two of the most popular consumer chipsets for AM4 builds: B450 and B550 - hopefully you'll have a better idea of which one fits your needs better by the end of the article.

While both chipsets have identical memory capacity, B550 is technically capable of higher memory speeds - that being said, if you're running Ryzen 3000 or 5000 you'll want your memory running at 3600MHz anyway, so this difference is negligible in practice.

Where the B550 chipset shines, however, is in peripheral I/O - with triple the USB SuperSpeed ports and an additional two SATA ports, it's capable of much higher throughput to drives, both internal and external. Finally, if it's important to your use case, B550 also provides an additional two usable PCIe lanes for even more peripheral devices.

Since the AM4 socket is being sunsetted soon, we'd recommend just buying the chipset you think makes the most sense for your current build - don't worry too much about futureproofing, it's likely you'll need to upgrade to an AM5 board next time you pick up a Ryzen chip anyways. The biggest deciding factor between the chipsets is USB capacity - if those USB 3.2 ports are important to you, we'd definitely recommend going with B550.

In the end, both chipsets are excellent for a modern PC build. Just make sure to pair whichever you choose with some high-quality components, like CORSAIR DDR4 RAM, a CORSAIR M.2 SSD, or a sleek new CORSAIR Case to complete your setup.