This classy Asus ROG B550 board is down to $164 this Black Friday weekend

Recently, Intel has stolen much of the limelight with the launch of its new Alder Lake CPUs, but it's not like AMD lost performance overnight. A Ryzen 5000 system is just as capable as it ever was, and there are some good Black Friday bargains to be had on AMD CPUs and motherboards, including the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming which is on sale at Amazon over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period. 

Despite featuring the ‘budget’ AMD B550 chipset, it’s unmistakably a high-end board, and it has some features that you’d expect to find on more expensive X570 boards.

This is the kind of board that can do almost everything an X570 board can do. You can overclock even a 5950X thanks to its strong 12-Phase VRM with appropriate cooling to match. 

You can run a fast PCIe 4.0 drive, it’s got 2.5G LAN and if you’re turned off by the prices of GPUs, it's got HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPorts—perfect for pairing with a 5000G series processor for a spot of casual gaming. About the only thing it's missing is Wi-Fi if that’s important to you.

It’s got a strong audio solution, USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and it wouldn’t be a gaming board without splashes of RGB, so you can show it off in a windowed case. And it runs good old DDR4, so, there’s no requirement to spend the big money on DDR5 that you might not even be able to find in stock anyway.

• For more Black Friday gaming PC deals… have a look here.

Despite the venerable AM4 socket reaching the twilight of its illustrious life, it’s not time to retire it yet. In 2022, AMD will launch its V-Cache enabled CPUs and its highly likely that the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming will support them after a BIOS upgrade. Investing in a B550 motherboard like the Asus is far from a dead end.