At least five different B550 motherboards were available for pre-order on Amazon over the weekend, but the initial inventory did not last long, as they were soon listed as "currently unavailable" and now appear to have been delisted from Amazon. Even if these listings appear earlier than intended for some reason, it appears that public availability of the B550 series is finally imminent.

Motherboards with AMD's B550 chipset will, in theory, support PCI Express 4.0 for more users. The B550 motherboard is a mainstream product and should be more affordable than the X570 motherboard, which is an enthusiast product.

I say "theoretically" because in the early stages, this is not yet the case. As Alan discovered last week, the MSRPs of some B550 motherboards are higher than X570 motherboards. One example is Gigabyte's B550 Aorus Master, which is Gigabyte's top B550 product, priced at $279.

Fortunately, not all B550 motherboards tend to be that way. The following were found on various listings on the r/buildapcsales subreddit and temporarily opened for pre-order yesterday (all made by MSI):

These prices are more encouraging than some MSRPs we've seen on other models. Naturally, features vary by model, but all five are lower than the prices of all X570 motherboards, and several B550 models are significantly lower. This is what we had hoped for.

As a reminder, AMD has confirmed that X570 and B550 motherboards will support the Zen 3 processor, which will be available later this year. The same goes for the previous generation X470 and B450 motherboards, which AMD initially said would not support Zen 3, but later changed its mind.