I upgraded my old desktop with new (and inexpensive) MB and M2 SSD, but with old graphics card, PSU, and HHD ((for storage). I forgot to flash the BIOS. Didn't matter. Installed Linux and it runs perfectly. And fast. One thing to note. This CPU fan screws directly into the MB rather than clips onto a bracket. Therefore you need to install the CPU and fan BEFORE installing the MB into the case. Don't overtight the screws.

no issues whatsoever, preforms as stated

I had a mobo die and took my cpu (Ryzen 5 5600G) with it. I was going to get the same or upgrade, but this one was just too good of a deal to pass up! So I went down a little in performance, the price to performance here is outstanding. My 3rd Ryzen cpu, just great.

a very good cpu for the money, I originally wanted a 5600x but decided on a 5500 after looking at the small % gains AND the extra $40 (for the 5600x). this cpu handles fortnite very well which was all I really wanted it for lol

For me CPUs like this, which are budget CPUs are mostly about the price. For $100 USD or less this is an excellent buy. If it's more than that, uhhhh. I'll take the 5600 for $130 Bob. While this is a Zen 3 CPU, it's not PCIe gen4 and you should be aware of this before buying. It's not the same line of CPU that most Zen 3 CPUs which are Vermeer. This is Cezanne. There are 3 Cezanne CPUs, the other two are OEM only, meaning they only come in a PC you buy from a company that makes PCs like Dell, etc........ For the most part this isn't a problem because it's a budget CPU, however if you pair this with something like an AMD Radeon 6500 XT which only uses 4 PCIe lanes to connect to the CPU, you'll get bad performance. So don't do that. Otherwise as long as you pair this with at least an 8 PCIe lane GPU it works fine. You take a tiny hit in GPU performance but not enough to worry about. The bigger hit comes with the NVMe drives, especially in 2023 and going forward. There are now MANY NVMe disks that are a lot faster than 4GB/s, and to give as simple explanation as I can, a PCIe lane is a serial data line. The way a PCIe device/bus works is by grouping a certain amount of lanes so that you get the speed of a single PCIe lane times the number of lanes you have. Any NVMe disk has 4 lanes. It also means the port you plug it into along with what it connects to (CPU, motherboard chipset) has 4 PCIe lanes that it will connect with. So, you get 4 PCIe lanes. So now you need to know the data speed for each lane. For PCIe gen3, the speed of each lane is 1GB/s. For PCIe gen4 the speed of each lane is 2GB/s. So, with this CPU, the best you can get is a data transfer rate of 4GB/s to an NVMe disk. That's it. The newest disks coming out the end of 2022, and 2023 can hit speeds near 9GB/s. Now, most data transfers to/from NVMe disks can't run at that speed. However many disks can run many data transfers faster than 4GB/s, so that means a CPU that runs PCIe gen3 is slowing down modern NVMe disks that can run gen4 or now gen5 speeds. But that's not a statement that has a clear meaning, because just because a disk is called gen4, it doesn't mean most of the data transfers to/from that disk will run at the full bandwidth of PCIe gen4 x4 lanes = 8GB/s. Most gen4 disks rarely hit that speed if ever. Only the most expensive ones do. BUT once again many will run different types of transfers above 4GB/s. So that's the description of what it means to have PCIe gen3 when dealing with modern NVMe disks. You're going to slow down some of the data transfers, not all, depending on how fast (which also means more expensive) the disk is. Yes for a general purpose PC build this is good enough and it's a low cost option that's really good at $100 USD or less. However if the price of this starts to get closer to the Ryzen 5600, I'd rather buy the 5600 because that's PCIe gen4 which is as good as it gets with an AMD AM4 motherboard.