ASUS Brings PCIe 4.0 Support to Select X470 and B450 Boards

[Tsing]

ASUS is giving prospective Ryzen 3000 owners a great reason not to upgrade to an expensive X570 board. AMD's Robert Hallock had claimed that PCIe 4.0 would not be supported on lesser chipsets, but ASUS will be proving him wrong with BIOS updates that bring the speedy bus standard to various X470 and B450 motherboards.

This is possible because the processors have their own chipset. While PCIe 4.0 isn't ubiquitous on non-X570 boards, the CPU's IO chip can still offer 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes for graphics cards and 4 more lanes for M.2 NVMe SSDs.

Yes, that's two 'chipset' chips. The one in the proc, thus is PCIe 4.0 and if you use X470 or another series 400 chipset, the interlinks are PCIe Gen 2.0. But that does mean that the CPU IO chip still can offer PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes to selected slots (graphics cards (x16) and one M2 slot (x4).

 

[Zarathustra]

That's interesting.

Not entirely useful to me, but I'm sure someone somewhere will find it useful.

To me, the biggest benefit of PCIe4 is that it provides the x570 chipset enough bandwidth that I can get an extra 8x PCIe slot. x470 and B450 chipsets won't get this.

 

[AntiQuark]

Its interesting that unlike previous PCIe bios upgrades it is reported some boards can run full bandwidth PCIe 4 x16. My previous mobo was updated to PCIe3 and would max out at x8, as did all others that got the update.
But sadly not all boards are getting the PCIe x4 update and some that do are maxed at x8.

A leaderboard of which mobos get it (from all mfrs) and whether they achieve x8 or x16 would be handy.
Useful for those looking to get a new, huge bandwidth PCIe 4.0 SSD.

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

This is honestly one of the things I least expected with the new X570 pcie 4.0 situation. Backwards compatibility is very impressive for AMD and its board partners this generation.

 

[alxlwson]

I feel like I remember AMD directly stating that there would be ZERO boards outside of the x570+ family that would get gen 4. That this was going to be an AGESA lockout

 

[Azrak]

What a terrible chart design. I thought the X's represented what was going to be supported, but no, the blank boxes and circles do according to the legend.
At least the M.2 slot will support Gen4 on my board. Makes more sense than the GPU slot.

I feel like I remember AMD directly stating that there would be ZERO boards outside of the x570+ family that would get gen 4. That this was going to be an AGESA lockout

Yup, I thought AMD was dictating to OEMs that they were not allowed to add Gen 4 support to previous gen boards. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.