The Riptide series appeared on the horizon towards the end of 2021 as an offshoot of the ragtag Phantom Gaming lineup. This time, the manufacturer decided not to blur the focus, but focused on mid-range models with an emphasis on gaming and overclocking. Most representatives of this series are equipped with power systems that are quite powerful by the standards of their class, they have more serious cooling than Phantom models, but there are no useful little things familiar to many, such as high-quality latches for a video card or an M.2 drive.


Simply put, the Riptide is such an inexpensive and not the most visually attractive sports car that accelerates to 200 km / h with ease and turns into corners with ease, but there is no power steering, no airbags, no coffee cup holders. If the lack of amenities does not bother you, the average representative of this series, not even with the most powerful B550-level chipset, is able to take on board a powerful Core i7 / Ryzen 7 caliber processor, a large amount of overclocked DDR4 / DDR5 RAM, several reactive M.2 SSDs and a video card of the level GeForce RTX 3060. And this is quite a serious gaming system that can handle ray tracing, 2K and high graphics settings.

One of the most eloquent examples of this is the ASRock B550M PG Riptide. With an official cost of less than $200, it can work with DDR-4733 RAM, supports data exchange via the PCI-E 4.0 bus, is friendly with the Crossfire mode, and is equipped with numerous connectors for RGB / ARGB tapes and liquid cooling. And its 8-phase power converter is ideal for powering an overclocked Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 level processor. And we, for a second, are talking about a compact micro-ATX board, which are usually not so developed.