Biostar Announces B550T-Silver Mini-ITX Motherboard For AMD's Ryzen 5000 Family
by Gavin Bonshor on April 16, 2021 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Biostar
- Mini ITX
- PCIe 4.0
- Zen 3
- B550
- Ryzen 5000
- B550T-Silver
Biostar has unveiled its latest mini-ITX motherboard for the AMD B550 chipset, the B550T-Silver, which is designed for use with AMD's Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 3000 processors. The small-sized board combines a simple silver and black aesthetic with decent features including PCIe 4.0 support, Wi-Fi 6, 2.5 GbE networking, and one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot.
With both NVIDIA and AMD moving quickly away from multi-graphics card setups to single card powerhouses, the mini-ITX form factor has become as potent as as it's ever been for gaming systems. Biostar's latest board, in turn, ticks a lot of boxes for users looking for a reasonably priced mini-ITX motherboard that can harness the power of AMD's Zen 3 processors to create a potent and pocket-sized gaming system/media center with the AMD's cheaper Ryzen chips.
From what we've seen, no X570 or B550 boards currently list support for the latest Ryzen 5000G APUs, which we expect to change once AMD rolls them out onto the wider market.
The Biostar B550T-Silver combines a basic and elegant black and silver color scheme, with plenty of features to be benefited from. There's one full-length PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, with a single PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot and four straight-angled SATA ports, including support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays. On the right-hand side of the board are two memory slots, which can support 64 GB of RAM at speeds up to DDR4-4933. Biostar isn't openly advertising the power delivery system, but we can see it uses one 8-pin 12 V ATX input to provide power to the CPU.
Biostar includes one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C, one USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, and four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports on the rear panel. There's an unspecified Wi-Fi 6 interface for wireless networking, and a Realtek RTL8125B 2.5 GbE controller. The board's integrated audio consists of three 3.5 mm audio jacks powered by a Realtek ALC897 HD audio codec. Users looking to build a mini-ITX media system can benefit from the integrated graphics on the Ryzen 4000 APUs through one HDMI 2.1 and a single DisplayPort video output pairing. Finishing off the rear panel is a PS/2 combo keyboard and mouse port.
At the time of writing, we don't currently have a price for the Biostar B550T-Silver mini-ITX motherboard or when it is expected to hit retail. However, we do expect it to be reasonably priced compared directly to some of the other mini-ITX B550 models.
Source: Biostar
Related Reading
- The AMD B550 Motherboard Overview: ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, ASRock, and Others
- AMD Ryzen 5000G APUs: OEM Only, For Now, Full Release Later This Year
- First AMD B550 With Thunderbolt 4: The ASUS ProArt B550-Creator
- The ASRock Rack B550D4-4L, a B550 Motherboard with BMC
- AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X, and 5600X Tested
62 Comments
View All Comments
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, April 17, 2021 - link
But why tho? SATA is perfectly fine, games still dont take advantage of NVMe speeds, and for things like media playback and general usage, SATA is still perfectly acceptable. And big sata SSDs tend to be cheaper then their M.2 brothers.For example, a 4TB NVMe SSD as of writing will cost you at least $800, while sata 4TB SSDs are running about $410-430. You can get gen 3 NVMe 4TB drives for about $600, or drives using QLC, but the SATA versions use the superior TLC and are still notably cheaper.
Dizoja86 - Sunday, April 18, 2021 - link
SATA isn't perfectly fine, at least not on a new build with other modern components. SATA will generally do the job well enough on current games, but try running something like Forza Horizon 3 or 4 on a SATA drive on a high-refresh monitor and watch the game constantly freeze as it loads assets. Once direct storage makes its way into gaming and we see more console ports from the current generation, SATA will likely only fall further behind.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, April 19, 2021 - link
Forza 3 and 4 run perfectly fine on sata SSDs. You have any sources for your claims? And you do realize those games were made to run on the slow OG xbox one and its 5400rpm disk, right?Dizoja86 - Monday, April 19, 2021 - link
You're going to say they run fine just off the top of your head without any sources of your own, eh? You could easily do a search for SSD utilization and stuttering with Forza 3/4, and pretty quickly see that SATA is not fine. I was constantly at 100% SSD utilization once I upgraded to a 144hz monitor, and the game would freeze repeatedly to load assets. No such problem when I moved to an NVME.Also, I'm running at maximum PC settings. Not Xbox One settings. You might be surprised that higher settings have higher hardware requirements.
tim851 - Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - link
Why would the game need to load more assets at 144 Hz? You're not increasing draw distance or moving through the level faster.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, April 21, 2021 - link
They dont, he's just trying to find a reason to whine about SATA. Running at higher settings wouldnt matter either, the method of loading textures he's talking about sounds like DirectStorage, which is not used in any games yet.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, April 21, 2021 - link
You made the claim they didnt run correctly, you provide the source. No review of those games mentioned SSD limitations, so again, provide your sources for your claim.Dizoja86 - Wednesday, April 21, 2021 - link
You're not paying me, so why would you expect somebody to do your work for you? Oh right, because you're just generally insufferable on this site, so of course you think everyone owes you labour. This isn't a scientific journal, so do the bare minimum of legwork to type something into Google if you actually care that much (it would've taken you less time than your obnoxious replies).RSAUser - Thursday, April 29, 2021 - link
@Dizoja86 you made the claim, you need to back it up.Forza 3 runs fine on a SATA SSD, on a HDD there's stuttering here and there but usually runs fine.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, April 19, 2021 - link
I mean yeah SATA isn't the best but its fine for most things and SATA ssds are really cheap for the most part meaning a lower entry cost compared to if the connecter switched to something like u.3 which would be the only reasonable new connecter for storage other than m.2 imo