I need a Mini-ITX AM4 board into which I can insert my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G and complete an upgrade of my fanless Debian system.

When I looked into things before, the Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX seemed the right choice.

Except it's out of stock, everywhere, for several weeks. :(

Looking again at the options, I'm wondering if the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-I Gaming is worth the extra cost and not having to wait.

The main downside of the Asus seems to be only a single HDMI port. The Gigabyte has 2xHDMI and 1xDP which means I can connect to 2xDVI monitors via HDMI-DVI cables, whilst the Asus has 1xHDMI and 1xDP which means I need to get a DP-DVI cable. (Scan have a passive cable for £5+delivery.)

Before I thought it was also worse USB-wise, but I think I got mixed up previously...

The rear panels have the following USB ports:
* Gigabyte has 1x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, 4x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1
* Asus has 3x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, 1x USB-A 2.0, 1x USB-C audio

And on the board itself are headers for:
* Gigabyte has 1x USB-A 3.2 Gen1, 1x USB-A 2.0
* Asus has 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen1, 2x USB-A 2.0, 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2

I don't know enough to know if there's any meaningful differences between Gigabyte's:
* Realtek 2.5GbE LAN chip (2.5 Gbit/1 Gbit/100 Mbit)
* Intel Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax Module, Supports IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth v5
* Realtek ALC1220-VB Audio Codec 7.1 CH HD Audio

and Asus's:
* Intel I225-V 2.5Gb Ethernet ASUS LANGuard
* Intel 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax) support 1024QAM/OFDMA/MU-MIMO and Bluetooth v5.1
* SupremeFX7.1 Surround Sound High Definition Audio CODEC S1220A

They both have sufficient probes on linux-hardware.org for me to not worry about compatibility...
https://linux-hardware.org/?id=board:gigabyte-b550i-aorus-pro-ax
https://linux-hardware.org/?id=board:asustek-rog-strix-b550-i-gaming-rev-x-0x

...except just to further confuse matters there's a 1.1 revision of the Gigabyte which swaps the wifi module for "AMD WiFi 6E 802.11ax & BT 5.2" - though I guess if that doesn't work I can use a USB WiFi receiver until drivers are available.

Do I need to know/care what the differences between Bluetooth 5.0, 5.1 or 5.2 are?

Are there any other reasons to pick one or the other?

I've had reliable boards from both. For me the USB of the Asus would make it win out, but that's me and having a buncha USB things going on but only one monitor.

Discrete GPU with desired ports?

Looking at the second part of the comparison there's really not anything to choose between the two. 

They've got a LAN port, surround sound jacks, wireless aerials and bluetooth. Unless you've got devices that can utilise the latest revision(s) of BT you won't see any discernible benefit of one over t'other. 
  Does the board not ship with drivers? Or is having physical media in the box a thing of the past these days? I last bought a mobo 10+ years ago and have been stalwartly upgrading and bastardising it over the years, but I'm sure it came with a driver disk. Still, you'd hope they'd at least release a download to coincide with the hardware launch :C

 

Not for linux.

Thanks all.

 

> Discrete GPU with desired ports?

It's not a question of desired ports, simply a preference to not get extra wires/adapters.

(Also, anything without noisy fans is liable to be a downgrade from the built-in Radeon.)

 

> Does the board not ship with drivers?

Many manufacturer's attitude to Linux-based OSes hasn't really changed in the past two decades, but even ignoring that aspect, the only universal media these days is USB drives.

(Heh, which makes me realise I'm going to want an SD reader for this machine.)

Thus, only Windows drivers are available for download, though at least the Gigabyte driver section does acknowledge its existence with: "Due to different Linux support condition provided by chipset vendors, please download Linux driver from chipset vendors' website or 3rd party website."

But yeah, it's basically down to when drivers are submitted to the kernel - anything too new might not have made it into an LTS release yet.