ive just seen a looooot of problems online with that board, many youtubers citing it, BIOS problems and all sorts. not to mention the apparently pretty long boot times and needing to attach the external audio dock thing in order to update the bios.
it just seems like a death from a thousand cuts situation making asus in a bad light, and this board in particular a borderline 'risky' proposition even.
and im coming from the strix b550 on the AMD 3000 series. that board and platform has been nothing but great to me which is why this last few months of Asus news has been a bit of a surprise
I'll say this as someone who's owned it from day oen of release:
1. MANY users had insane long boot times because Asus failed to make "context restore memory timings" default to enabled, it defaults to off, which caused post times to be 30 - 50 seconds even after the first power on/memory test. Enabling it makes post times 2- 4 seconds max, just like any other board. I've helped so many users on multiple forums fix that issue, and its not limited to this boards, its a very common issue with lots of boards runnng ddr5
2. Until recently its BIOS have been undercooked, you had to navigate around some broken/stupid things, but the most recent 1616 bios have been golden and fixed every issue I had, even silly ones like the VRM fan always powering on at 100% for 3 seconds.
3. I have no idea what you mean about "external audio dock thing', do you mean the Asus Hive? If so thats 100% optional to use, you DO NOT need it to update bios (you can update them from any usb port through the bios menu like all boards). I actually love the hive as it allows you to see your post led codes out side the case, making troubleshooting easy. But you can 100% throw it away and never need to use it if you dont want. The audio outs are indeed connected to it, but I never use them (as why would anyone? our GPU's handle uncompressed audio, you have USB-C out for ultra high powered DAC's if you want )
4. Buy it on amazon, try it for a few weeks, and if you run into any issues you can't live with, send it back
Extra: careful installing NVME drives, the default spacers they give you can bend them causing poor contact with the headsink. Its easy to fix by cutting down the spacers, but be mindful of it. Also make sure you read the manual on the little daughter card that has the usb, front pannel headers and cmos reset switch, there are extra headers on it that control PCI-E generation and voltage unlocking. Its actually a nice thing to have, esspeically if you use long riser cables as sometimes they can be flakey and you need to drop to PCI-E gen 3 to make some of them work (I built a lot of rigs, so run into faulty riser cables alot).