Often with reviews its not common to see more budget-friendly options shown off, but today we’re going against the grain with the confusingly cheap B550 PRO-VDH WIFI from MSI. This motherboard costs only around 90 dollars on Newegg, which is pretty insane, even for a considerably dated motherboard like this one.

Micro-ATX in form with the AM4 PGA CPU socket, this motherboard is well suited to low-budget builds. It uses the B550 chipset and utilizes 4 sticks of DDR4 RAM, up to 128GB total. The “WIFI” in the name is of course, for the WIFI connection ability. The motherboard comes with two WIFI antennae that connect to the rear I/O panel and while rather obviously most would prefer having a LAN connection instead, its very useful for more mobile setups.

As for quality, its not bad. The only issue that could really be found was that the USB ports were a bit easy to bend out of shape. Good soldering, and the reinforcements to the PCIe connectors are very nice (though, for a budget build, it doesn’t quite make sense to get a super heavy GPU). Good quality for the pricing!

The motherboard has a variety of features, like the M.2 Shield Frozr (Essentially, a heatsink for your SSDs), and a dedicated flash BIOS button that are shown in better detail by the official MSI website linked here.

There really isn’t much else to talk about with a motherboard, other than maybe the chipset. It uses the B550 chipset. Basic but it’ll get the job done for older Ryzen CPUs.

That’s pretty much all I can think of about this thing. Affordable, and not bad.

Note:  This review is part of a classroom project.