With the silicon shortage, now may not be the best time to build a new PC, but ASRock's B550 Taichi Razer Edition motherboard is a great place to start. It's on sale right now at Newegg for $249.99.

This is $50 less than list price and partially addresses the only complaint mentioned in our review, that many X570 boards can be had for less. However, this is not the most expensive board on Newegg, as long as there are more premium options in the B550 realm. Ignoring marketplace sellers, that distinction belongs to the Asus ROG Strix B550-XE Gaming WiFi, which sells for $329.99.

Whether you should buy a high-end board with a cheap chipset or a low-end board with a high-end chipset depends on what features you want. In any case, it is worth noting that we consider the B550 Taichi Razer Edition to be one of the best B550 motherboards for gaming.

It is sleek looking and of course offers ample RGB lighting. But beyond good looks, there are premium features such as a powerful VRM for overclocking, 2.5G LAN port and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) connectivity (both provided by Killer), large heat sinks, and fairly robust I/O with a mix of USB Type-C case headers are available in abundance.

The board performed well in our tests, often leading other X570 and B550 boards in multi-threaded benchmarks. We were also able to extract adequate overclocking performance from this board using a Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. [Although this board is based on AMD's budget chipset, it offers a number of powerful features at a reasonable price.