The Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro is a well built, practical board with great features, including 2.5 Gb/s LAN, a powerful VRM, and an integrated I/O shield. When it comes to looks, the Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro may not turn heads like some more flashy designs, but the neutral gray and black theme of the B550 AORUS Pro has an appeal of its own and will be an easy fit in almost any build.

Out of the box performance was great for the Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro. Memory overclocking was pretty good as well, as I reached 4066 MHz CL16 stable with my Trident Z Neo kit. Tightening the memory timings was not successful, with the Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro unable to boot into Windows at 3600 MHz CL14. For CPU overclocking, I was able to achieve 4.4 GHz on all cores, which matches the other B550 boards I have tested. VRM thermals were very good as well, staying under 60 °C even during my VRM torture testing.

The Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro has a lot going for it, so the final question is this: Should you buy a high-end B550 motherboard or a low-end X570 motherboard? For not much more than the Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro, you can get some pretty decent entry-level X570 boards. What the Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro offers is modern features, such as 2.5 Gb/s LAN, although at the cost of no more than a PCIe 4.0 x16 and a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot. I think for most users, the newer features will win out. There is little to be gained in real world performance from PCIe 4.0 right now, and most users will not need more than their GPU and one PCIe 4.0 capable NVMe SSD even after the storage and GPU markets have caught up.

The Gigabyte B550 AORUS Pro is a great board for those looking for a powerful VRM and a mainstream feature set without breaking the bank.