It’s rare to find AMD motherboards with Thunderbolt ports of any flavor. Thunderbolt, which is an Intel-backed spec for connecting high-speed external devices, appears almost exclusively on Intel-based platforms. Doing research for this review, we could find only a handful of AMD motherboards that support Thunderbolt of any kind, with the Asus ProArt B550-Creator tested here the only one that offers the latest flavor, Thunderbolt 4. And it ships with two of these ports, too! This makes the ProArt B550-Creator a rather rare PCB. Better yet, at $299.99, it’s one of the most affordable boards to ship with Thunderbolt 4 on either side of the CPU aisle. If Thunderbolt 4 is a must-have feature in your next PC build, this Asus motherboard is well worth considering, and a fait accompli if you’re partial to Ryzen.
The Design: Art From the Minimalist School
Though this ATX-form-factor board has “Art” in its name, its appearance is far from florid. Asus targets its ProArt motherboards as products for businesses and content-creation experts, and for those usage cases, starker aesthetics make more sense.
The ProArt B550-Creator features a black PCB with black heatsinks on the VRMs, the chipset, and the M.2 slots. The rear I/O shroud is also black, but it’s made of an opaque plastic that leaves some components underneath barely visible.
Though the look is mostly monotone, I actually appreciate its simple design language. Nowadays, it seems as if many companies think everything needs to have LEDs and chrome. The heatspreaders on the M.2 slots are a bit starker than I might like, but overall I don’t think the board’s appearance will turn anyone away.
The VRM heatsinks certainly don’t look inadequate or undersized, and those are two of the most important cooling parts on any board. The ProArt utilizes a 12+2 power phase design that’s comparable to what you’ll find on many midrange gaming boards. The B550 chipset supports overclocking, too, so you might even be able to push your CPU up a notch without overtaxing the VRMs.
A Look at the Networking and Audio
Asus built two 2.5Mbps Intel i225-V Ethernet controllers into the ProArt B550-Creator. This is excellent networking hardware for the price, given the board’s position as a midrange business solution. There’s no built-in Wi-Fi, and there isn’t an M.2 Key E header onboard either, which means you’ll need to pick up a USB dongle or a PCI Express Wi-Fi card to add wireless networking.
Realtek’s S1220A, which is one of the chip maker’s most popular audio codecs, handles sound output on the ProArt B550-Creator. The S1220A chip supports a signal-to-noise ratio of 120dB for stereo playback output, and it connects to five 3.5mm audio jacks on the rear I/O panel to support up to a 7.1 sound system. As is common on many modern boards, the audio codec and most of the audio hardware are segregated from the rest of the motherboard components. This helps to reduce noise.
The Rear I/O Panel and Internal Headers
One place the ProArt B550-Creator stands out is its rear I/O panel, thanks to the two Thunderbolt 4 USB Type-C ports brought up earlier. As mentioned, these ports are highly uncommon on consumer boards in this price range and even more so on AMD platforms, but they make sense for a business board, as a business is more likely to take advantage of two of these high-speed connectors for connecting fast drive Thunderbolt arrays or high-end content-creation monitors using Thunderbolt or USB-C.
The I/O panel also features four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and two slower USB 2.0 ports, the latter destined for input peripherals. You’ll also find the usual five 3.5mm audio jacks, an optical S/PDIF connector, two Ethernet ports, and HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs. The last two are useful only if you use a Ryzen G series processor with on-chip Radeon graphics, such as the Ryzen 7 5700G. (Remember, most AMD Ryzen CPUs require an accompanying graphics card.)
The placement of ports is, overall, excellent, and helps make building a system on the B550-Creator a relatively painless process. The CPU power connectors, hemmed in by heatsinks and the I/O shroud, are a bit difficult to access—what else is new?—but the CPU fan headers are all set to the right of the top heatsink. This makes them easier to see and get to than on many other boards.
One disappointing aspect of the ProArt B550-Creator’s design is that there are just four SATA 3.0 ports. True, the SATA interface for storage devices has been declining in importance in recent years as M.2 Key M slots steadily take over as the primary connections for solid-state drives, so if this were a gaming board, I’d probably give the few ports a pass. But for a business solution, the low number of SATA 3.0 ports could be something of a shortfall—after all, I just finished praising the motherboard’s rear I/O panel for its suitability for storage devices, so I can’t ignore it falling short on the same score with its internal headers and ports.
Mind you, four SATA ports will be enough for many users’ needs, but that’s fewer than offered by a typical consumer ATX motherboard. It makes this board a poor choice for clients with big internal-storage needs, especially if they rely on the cheap mass storage afforded by 3.5-inch hard drives.
Speaking of M.2 Key M slots for fast SSDs, you get two on this board, which helps make up slightly for the reduced number of SATA ports. The primary M.2 Key M slot supports a PCI Express 4.0 x4 connection, while the secondary slot employs the older PCIe 3.0 x4, but both support data transfer speeds far in excess of SATA 3.0.
A Brief Look at the BIOS
The ProArt B550-Creator’s BIOS is nearly identical to what we’ve seen on other recent Asus motherboards. The most notable difference between the ProArt’s BIOS and that of most Republic of Gamers (ROG) boards is its blue rather than red color scheme.
The board initially boots into an EZ Mode BIOS that displays basic system information about the board, RAM, and CPU. You can adjust the boot order and set a memory profile here, as well as tweak fan settings and turn the system’s LEDs on or off. A notable missing feature on this page is an option to flash the BIOS.
Over in the Advanced Mode BIOS are a myriad of controls, the most of important of which (since this is a B550-chipset board) are options to overclock the CPU and RAM. There are also some tools built into the BIOS Advanced menu to securely erase data from an SSD you mean to dispose of or repurpose.
Verdict: A Rare Thunder-Bird
With its two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a sight seldom seen on any AMD motherboard, the ProArt B550-Creator fills a very specific market niche. Though it’s not the first AMD motherboard to boast Thunderbolt support, it’s one of only a handful, and its two Thunderbolt 4 ports are rare even among Intel boards. Providing them while keeping the board’s price from being exorbitant is quite a feat. The B550-Creator’s list price of $299.99 isn’t outlandish.
That said, this is still a specialized product. If you have no use for Thunderbolt 4, plenty of more-affordable AMD B550 motherboards otherwise have feature parity with the ProArt B550-Creator. But if you use a lot of external drives, we highly recommend this board. Indeed, if you want both Thunderbolt 4 and Ryzen, it’s your best and only bet.
