MSI's new MAG B550M Mortar board is aimed at entry-level gaming. It is a compact board and the only Micro-ATX option in MSI's first B550 offering. Idea While affordable, it has all the features you actually need and not a lot of bells and whistles that won't help you with your gaming.

First of all, there is a unique lack of the AMD B550 chipset. This means that the PCH chip has half the bandwidth of the AMD 500 series chipset compared to the X570. This is primarily important for peripherals such as secondary SSDs and USB connections. There are 16 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes for graphics and 4 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes for the primary SSD, all of which are connected directly to the CPU socket.

Inevitably, due to the relatively modest pricing, the 16 PCIe 4.0 graphics lanes are limited to the primary PEG-16 slot. There is another full-length slot below, but it is fed from the PCH chip, limiting the PCI Express Gen 3 lanes to four. In other words, forget about dual GPU gaming. In fact, this is what the market generally does, forget about multi-GPU, at least for now. So this omission is fine with us and will make this board less expensive without affecting gaming or the computing experience in general.

In most cases, the Micro-ATX form factor does as well. You can cut costs without sacrificing your gaming enjoyment: six SATA ports, dual M.2 slots, PCI Express Gen 4 for graphics cards (on the B550 chipset, only one of the M.2 ports supports PCI Express Gen 4 speeds) Don't forget. So from a core gaming and performance standpoint, this board has you covered.

At this price point, something has to give, of course, but the MAG B550M Mortar is severely lacking in luxuries. There is no debug display, no physical power or reset button, no RGB lighting. Of course, none of this makes a difference in-game, and since you save £100/$100 over a premium B550 board like the Asus ROG Strix B550-E Gaming, it's easy to argue that you can invest in what really matters: a better graphics card.

Other details include the fact that only one heatspreader is included with the two M.2 slots. This includes a memory DIMM slot with clips on both ends and a user manual that feels a bit dated and clunky compared to Asus' relative sophistication. However, the MAG B550M Mortar BIOS menu is polished, friendly, and full-featured.

When it comes to performance, the MSI MAG B550M Mortar is a tale of two halves. In stock settings, it is truly impressive. However, like other B550s we've tested recently, its compatibility with extended memory profiles is shaky; MSI offers A-XMP to the Asus DOCP, but like the Asus board, it didn't result in a bootable rig even with the full 3,000 MHz of DDR4 DIMMs we tested .

However, 2,866 MHz is achievable, and the B550M Mortar, configured in this way, put up some impressive numbers. Among the trio of early B550 mobos, Cinebench 15 single-threaded and multithreaded, Cinebench 20 single-threaded, faster in X264 encoding and memory bandwidth. More importantly, higher frame rates are achieved in Civilization VI, Metro Exodus, and Far Cry New Dawn.

It may be difficult to compare the lowest frame rate in Far Cry New Dawn between the MSI MAG B550M and the Asus TUF Gaming B550M-Plus Wi-Fi, 57 frames per second versus 54 frames per second. However, this advantage is consistent across gaming benchmarks. It is not within the margin of error. This MSI board is also efficient: it consumes less power than Asus' B550 board and has a lower operating temperature.

This is all well and good, but there is a catch, as expected. The Achilles heel of the MSI MAG B550M Mortar is overclocking: while the two Asus boards easily achieved 4.2GHz all-core on the AMD Ryzen 3100 quad-core test chip, the B550M Mortar was able to achieve 3.9GHz all-core Turbo rated for the 3100 at It achieved only 4 GHz, only 100 MHz above the 3100's all-core Turbo rating of 3.9 GHz.

There is no doubt that higher speeds can be achieved depending on fine tuning, but it is not encouraging. If overclocking is your main concern, the simple conclusion about the MSI MAG B550M Mortar is to jog. However, not everyone wants to overclock, and for those who don't, the performance and efficiency offered are certainly appealing. Finally, the Wi-Fi version of the B550M Mortar is usually available for about $10-15 more, and if you're inclined to MSI and run your gaming rig wirelessly, you probably can't go wrong.