"Pre-X570 boards will not support PCIe Gen 4" Which means current ie "old" Threadripper motherboards should not have support. Which makes since high-end x470 boards I assume are made to practically the same quality as mid to high-end Threadripper boards.
There is a separate article on the site, that discusses that to the depth it's currently known: Evidently AMD licensed sufficient IP assets from ASmedia to then create the chipset inhouse.
"When final BIOSes are released for 3rd Gen Ryzen (AGESA 1000+), Gen4 will not be an option anymore." Which means all new official Bios will remove the option for Gen4 on anything boards older than x570. So if you don't upgrade your bios again you might be able to keep gen4 support if it works for your motherboard but it will not be official.
Its quite likely that it didn't actually work in the first place, just the UI option being there was a fluke. But ultimately, there are no devices in 2019 that can really make use of it.
8 TDP matters because there is not a lot of space for any real type of heatsink on M.2 drives on most Motherboards without getting in the way or blocking access to stuff.
Makes sense. If it worked, it would only be for the top x16 slot on most boards as the m.2 slot on most boards would be too far away from the CPU socket any way. And the m.2 slot would be the main benefactor of PCIe 4.0. Add that the PCH on 300 and 400-series boards isn't PCIe 4.0 capable anyway, and you'd have extremely limited use of the functionality if it were enabled. Consumer graphics cards don't require, or even benefit much from, PCIe 4.0 yet. It would only be useful on graphics cards with HBCC, and the feature enabled. So that means the Radeon Vega series cards only. The upcoming Navi doesn't appear to have HBCC.
I'd rather have solid PCIe3 than sketchy PCIe4 tbh. It's not like my graphics card or SSD can use PCIe4 anyway. And I don't intend to upgrade them just because I got a new CPU.
As/when my existing motherboard dies I'll probably upgrade it to PCIe4, but I'm not going to try and hack it for some sketchy solution when I don't need to. That's just asking for a BSOD.
On buses you get the best signal integrity at the end of the line. The reflections from the RF stub at the end of the line interfere. There is less insertion loss when you’re closer, but when it’s a bus that isn’t the primary concern. Just read your mobo manual about where to place the DIMMs.
I get it, and I'm not even really upset about it. Only thing is - I'm unlikely to spring for a board the level of the Crosshair VII again. It's not that it's been a bad board, which is good considering the cost. It's just that it doesn't, in hindsight, seem to bring anything really worthy of the cost. I don't LN2 cool, I'm letting XFR/PB2 handle my clocks. I'm running a 2600X and a single RTX 2080. The only real thing it brought was the ability to run 2 NVME drives, but I didn't *need* to do that, it was just nicer to grab a 1TB NVME for the 2nd slot instead of just getting a SATA (they were the same price when I ordered).
The one thing that was going to 'save' my purchase of it was it moving seemlessly to PCIe 4.0.
That said, I don't have buyers remorse or anything, and as the article says it's not like that's something that will really mean anything, especially to me, for quite awhile. It does make me a little happier, actually, because now I know that spending that much on a board is a waste for me, so it'll save me money down the road (yay!).
If you have a decent high-end X470 board already, I would probably just skip X570 and roll with it as long as it carries you. One or two more generations and the socket will probably change as well, requiring a new board anyway.
Yeah, I used to go high end, but my last (and future) builds I've made a list of must have, nice to have, and don't care. I buy the cheapest board that meets it. I keep and "future update" promises out of the equation.
I have a question. I have a B350 board, and based on this article, I won't be getting PCIe 4.0 support. I am using it with an R5 1600 and a Radeon R9 270x, with a Samsung 960 in the M2 slot. Would going to a newer motherboard that supports PCIe4.0 make any sitnificant difference? I don't think so, but I'd like your opinion.
Short answer: It wouldn't since your CPU does not suport PCIe 4.0 and it honestly does not seem that you are constrained wrt available PCIe lanes right now.
First of all, you would need a new CPU that supports PCIe 4.0, ie. a Ryzen 3000 CPU. If you would plan to buy one of those, there might be other factors that might favor a X570, but for PCIe 4.0 alone -- there aren't even any devices that can really benefit.
Thank you both. I was considering an upgrade to the R9 3900x once the price goes down (even next year, when the 4*** are released): it seems to me that going from 6 to 12 cores would bring a noticeable bump in performance, at a very decent cost (in one year the 3900x could easily drop sub 400usd).
A B350 board might not have the power delivery design for a 12-core CPU, so in such a case it would likely be a good idea to change that in any case. Well, all depends on your particular model of B350 in any case!
I have the MSI Tomahawk. It does support 105W CPUs (the 2700x, for example). The support page has not been updated yet (the BIOS is being updated now to the latest Agesa ComboPI) so I can't be 100% sure.
MSI has been very restrictive on devices that would be getting support for Ryzen 3k. The Tomahawk might be one of the better B350 boards. But I doubt you will see any support from MSI for Zen 2 on that. Specially not one like the 3900x (its not just a simple TDP number that impacts support). Overall considering how they have handled AMD products as a whole, I think they A.) Know they screwed up early and they either can not or would be to difficult to fix. B.) It's AMD related so they can't really be bothered.
Games fps leveled out after Gen3 x8 .. Several sites tested it. Maybe newer games on bigger hardware like 2x 2080's could benefit slightly, but i doubt it would make more than a sub 1fps difference. See more here or at Toms: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce...
Basically, from the first impression we see with the chipset heatsink on x570, it means that PCIe 4.0 makes the chip run hotter.
Basically, PCIe 4.0 could introduce risk of failling hardware. It would be totally irresponsible from AMD to go backward entirely. Yes, it kind of blow, but at least your mobo will not die because the hardware was not designed fot it.
The chipset was always going to stay PCIe 3.0 anyway on older boards, it cannot magically grow a PCIe 4.0 controller - and thats what is running hot. The dedicated PCIe slots directly connected to the CPU without any intermediate chips where the only to even have a chance to support PCIe 4.0 on older boards.
I don't really see this as being a huge issue for a lot of people. I know that PCIe 4.0 will give much more bandwith to M.2 SSD devices, however most people were really hoping for a boost in GPU performance. That's not going to happen till at least 2020. The most powerful GPUs on the market don't support PCIe 4.0 because Nvidia chose to give the RTX chips a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 bus interface, even though the PCI-Express gen 4.0 specification was expected. AMD's new GPUs will take advantage of PCIe 4.0 however they are expected to only compete against the RTX 2060, RTX 2070, possibly the RTX 2080. That means that the very best gaming GPUs will still be the RTX 2080Ti and Titan, neither of which have native support for PCIe 4.0. By in large the most popular GPUs in use are the GTX 1000 series and they will of course have no native support either.
By the time that AMD has a truly worthy high end GPU on PCIe 4.0 and Nvidia releases their next gen GPUs with PCIe 4.0 native support we will all be awaiting the release of X670 motherboards and Zen 2+. PCIe 4.0 in this generation is a "nice to have" feature but far from practical. As long as the 3000 series processors perform just as good on X470 as on X570 I see no reason to upgrade to X570 when the only real difference will be PCIe 4.0 support.
Totally agreed - PCIe 4.0 would have meant more on an SSD than on an x16 slot, and the layouts of most boards meant that adding PCIe 4 to the m2 slots of an older board was almost certainly out of the question. MAYBE for someone who wants to do GPU compute stuff, but if you're spending enough money to buy a Radeon Instinct (or something), the cost of a new motherboard is basically a rounding error in your build cost.
It won't matter anyway, even if a device is PCIe 4.0. Graphics cards already don't use the full bandwidth of 3.0, and anyone who is going to spend the money on a new CPU to get 4.0 and the money on a device that actually makes use of 4.0 speeds, a new $100 motherboard is going to be a drop in a hat compared to the CPU and 4.0 device that actually uses 4.0 speeds.
There are M.2. SSD's being shown off at computex already making use of PCIE 4.0 speeds. So it might matter to content developers or anyone where mex sequential IO throughput matters. For graphics cards its pointless at least today. I certainly will be skipping over this generation as long as x370 motherboards don't take any performance hit with Ryzen 3000 CPU's.
Depends on the graphics card that is utilized. I have seen the RTX 2080 Titan fully saturate PCIe 3.0 and I believe that the RTX 2080Ti can as well. Its not easy to get them to do so and most normal applications or gaming isn't going to push those monster cards that hard, but it is possible. The biggest problem with PCIe 4.0 in respects to current graphics cards is simply that the highest end graphics cards available don't support PCIe 4.0, making the technology moot until the next gen of graphics cards launch that will have PCIe 4.0 native support.
Given that all of the previous X-series chipsets have only appeared on ATX (or larger) boards, it means that potential Ryzen 3000 series customers who wanted to build a smaller system (mATX or ITX, etc.) are now forced to decide between waiting to build until the B-series is released, or buying an older board and forgoing PCIe 4.0 support. If you planned on holding on to the system for a while, that could be an issue, particularly for SSDs (there's a surprising number of mATX boards that have 2 m2 slots, making a new, faster SSD an easy drop-in upgrade).
"Given that all of the previous X-series chipsets have only appeared on ATX (or larger) boards..."
The ROG STRIX X370-I/X470-I, ASRock X370/X470 Gaming ITX/AC would like to have words with you; not to mention the upcoming ASUS and ASRock MiniITX/MiniDTX boards.
Makes sense, and no one who bought an x370/x470 motherboard expected to get PCIe4.x support from it. People don't also realize that PCIe4.x lanes from the x370/x470 chipset would require the x570 chipset anyway. At best you might have seen some problematic support for pcie4.x from the cpu in an x370/x470--maybe. Better to confine it to x570 chipset--drawing ~11W I hear, versus the x470 which draws ~5W.
Does someone know whether improved memory support depends only on processor or motherboard is also significantly involved from hardware point of view? Will it be enough to update BIOS on older motherboards to enjoy compatibility with higher clocked DDR4?
The processor has a role to play but from my experience the motherboard plays a much larger role in memory support, and that is at a hardware level. X570 will doubtless have better memory support than X470, which has better support than X370. While bios updates can help, the only way to truly support higher overclocks on the memory is with hardware improvements. In short bios updates are software and we have already seen that X370 can't support the same memory speeds as X470, so logically X470 won't be able to have as high memory clocks as X570 no matter what bios updates come out.
X570 is supposed to support 3200Mhz right out of the box and is supposed to be able to support up to 5000Mhz, which is insane. With my X470-F Strix I am running 3200Mhz GSkill (Samsung B die) @ 3600Mhz CL14 with very tight sub timings. While it is possible that I might be able to squeeze a little more out of it with a X570 board the memory itself is already pushing its upper limits so realistically I won't see anymore RAM performance on X570 than I am already getting on X470 without buying 3600, 4000Mhz RAM+ which is almost as expensive as buying a new motherboard.
Until RAM prices drop for 4000+Mhz RAM the improved memory support of the X570 motherboards is again nice to have, but cost preventative. These new boards will have a lot of nice "future proof" qualities, but at the same time by the time that M.2 SSDs that can support PCIe 4.0 drop in price and 4000+ Mhz RAM drops in price the next gen X670 boards will be soon to release bringing some other new feature.
I'd say if you already have a quality X470 board that there really isn't a reason to upgrade to X570 unless you have tons of money to throw at the very latest and fastest M.2 SSDs and RAM.
Re-read the 3rd paragraph. AMD never said older motherboards would be upgraded via a BIOS update. It was speculated, then magically became fact? It was expected because of all the speculation.
Silly. Part of the PC consumer space is finding that rare gem that does something others don't and then getting to brag about it. I don't think there are going to be many people hunting down older x470 boards for new builds to get PCIE 4.0. But people on older boards will be happy with added support. Bad move AMD, I'm sure the modding community will take care of it.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
50 Comments
Back to Article
Scott_T - Sunday, June 2, 2019 - link
it wont surprise me if we see hacks enabling it on older motherboards.Fujikoma - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I see it as a non-marketed feature on the X470. Enabled in BIOS, but not listed on the product graphics or literature.Ian Cutress - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
AMD won't be enabling it in the chipset firmware for these boards, so unless you use a hacked firmware implementation, it won't be possible.Agent Smith - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
What about Threadripper boards?Ian Cutress - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Will still be PCIe 3.0 regardless. We'll know when AMD says more about upcoming TRSkeptical123 - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
"Pre-X570 boards will not support PCIe Gen 4" Which means current ie "old" Threadripper motherboards should not have support. Which makes since high-end x470 boards I assume are made to practically the same quality as mid to high-end Threadripper boards.alufan - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
my gigabyte x470 which i updated last week has the option i bios already but that doesnt mean to say it will workIan Cutress - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Read the highlighted quote bit. Chances are that option didn't have any code behind it.Manch - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Say BIOS option will be reversed. Maybe a chance it's in there? Wonder if x570 BIOS could be flashed over it?Manch - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Arrghh, need edit: ...flashed over it? Also is the x570 THAT different than the 4 series?Ian Cutress - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Yes. Completely different chip by different manufacturer on different process with different IO block layout.Manch - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Ah OK, did not know that. Asmedia was the old. Who is the new?abufrejoval - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
There is a separate article on the site, that discusses that to the depth it's currently known: Evidently AMD licensed sufficient IP assets from ASmedia to then create the chipset inhouse.MrBlowfish - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
No it couldn't, yes it is.Skeptical123 - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
"When final BIOSes are released for 3rd Gen Ryzen (AGESA 1000+), Gen4 will not be an option anymore." Which means all new official Bios will remove the option for Gen4 on anything boards older than x570. So if you don't upgrade your bios again you might be able to keep gen4 support if it works for your motherboard but it will not be official.nevcairiel - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Its quite likely that it didn't actually work in the first place, just the UI option being there was a fluke.But ultimately, there are no devices in 2019 that can really make use of it.
imaheadcase - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
"command a high premium with an 8W TDP too"Since when did high end computers care about TDP. lol
Skeptical123 - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
8 TDP matters because there is not a lot of space for any real type of heatsink on M.2 drives on most Motherboards without getting in the way or blocking access to stuff.SaturnusDK - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Makes sense. If it worked, it would only be for the top x16 slot on most boards as the m.2 slot on most boards would be too far away from the CPU socket any way. And the m.2 slot would be the main benefactor of PCIe 4.0.Add that the PCH on 300 and 400-series boards isn't PCIe 4.0 capable anyway, and you'd have extremely limited use of the functionality if it were enabled.
Consumer graphics cards don't require, or even benefit much from, PCIe 4.0 yet. It would only be useful on graphics cards with HBCC, and the feature enabled. So that means the Radeon Vega series cards only. The upcoming Navi doesn't appear to have HBCC.
SaturnusDK - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I forgot to mention. No consumer Vega based cards even have PCIe 4.0 capability.Haawser - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I'd rather have solid PCIe3 than sketchy PCIe4 tbh. It's not like my graphics card or SSD can use PCIe4 anyway. And I don't intend to upgrade them just because I got a new CPU.As/when my existing motherboard dies I'll probably upgrade it to PCIe4, but I'm not going to try and hack it for some sketchy solution when I don't need to. That's just asking for a BSOD.
willis936 - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
On buses you get the best signal integrity at the end of the line. The reflections from the RF stub at the end of the line interfere. There is less insertion loss when you’re closer, but when it’s a bus that isn’t the primary concern. Just read your mobo manual about where to place the DIMMs.seamonkey79 - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I get it, and I'm not even really upset about it. Only thing is - I'm unlikely to spring for a board the level of the Crosshair VII again. It's not that it's been a bad board, which is good considering the cost. It's just that it doesn't, in hindsight, seem to bring anything really worthy of the cost. I don't LN2 cool, I'm letting XFR/PB2 handle my clocks. I'm running a 2600X and a single RTX 2080. The only real thing it brought was the ability to run 2 NVME drives, but I didn't *need* to do that, it was just nicer to grab a 1TB NVME for the 2nd slot instead of just getting a SATA (they were the same price when I ordered).The one thing that was going to 'save' my purchase of it was it moving seemlessly to PCIe 4.0.
That said, I don't have buyers remorse or anything, and as the article says it's not like that's something that will really mean anything, especially to me, for quite awhile. It does make me a little happier, actually, because now I know that spending that much on a board is a waste for me, so it'll save me money down the road (yay!).
nevcairiel - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
If you have a decent high-end X470 board already, I would probably just skip X570 and roll with it as long as it carries you. One or two more generations and the socket will probably change as well, requiring a new board anyway.SmCaudata - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Yeah, I used to go high end, but my last (and future) builds I've made a list of must have, nice to have, and don't care. I buy the cheapest board that meets it. I keep and "future update" promises out of the equation.yankeeDDL - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I have a question.I have a B350 board, and based on this article, I won't be getting PCIe 4.0 support.
I am using it with an R5 1600 and a Radeon R9 270x, with a Samsung 960 in the M2 slot.
Would going to a newer motherboard that supports PCIe4.0 make any sitnificant difference?
I don't think so, but I'd like your opinion.
Irata - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Short answer: It wouldn't since your CPU does not suport PCIe 4.0 and it honestly does not seem that you are constrained wrt available PCIe lanes right now.nevcairiel - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
In short: No.First of all, you would need a new CPU that supports PCIe 4.0, ie. a Ryzen 3000 CPU. If you would plan to buy one of those, there might be other factors that might favor a X570, but for PCIe 4.0 alone -- there aren't even any devices that can really benefit.
yankeeDDL - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Thank you both.I was considering an upgrade to the R9 3900x once the price goes down (even next year, when the 4*** are released): it seems to me that going from 6 to 12 cores would bring a noticeable bump in performance, at a very decent cost (in one year the 3900x could easily drop sub 400usd).
nevcairiel - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
A B350 board might not have the power delivery design for a 12-core CPU, so in such a case it would likely be a good idea to change that in any case. Well, all depends on your particular model of B350 in any case!yankeeDDL - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I have the MSI Tomahawk. It does support 105W CPUs (the 2700x, for example). The support page has not been updated yet (the BIOS is being updated now to the latest Agesa ComboPI) so I can't be 100% sure.Topweasel - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
MSI has been very restrictive on devices that would be getting support for Ryzen 3k. The Tomahawk might be one of the better B350 boards. But I doubt you will see any support from MSI for Zen 2 on that. Specially not one like the 3900x (its not just a simple TDP number that impacts support). Overall considering how they have handled AMD products as a whole, I think they A.) Know they screwed up early and they either can not or would be to difficult to fix. B.) It's AMD related so they can't really be bothered.Cooe - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
MSI has actually guaranteed support for their entire B350 line, so this just isn't true.brunis.dk - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Games fps leveled out after Gen3 x8 .. Several sites tested it. Maybe newer games on bigger hardware like 2x 2080's could benefit slightly, but i doubt it would make more than a sub 1fps difference. See more here or at Toms: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce...eva02langley - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Basically, from the first impression we see with the chipset heatsink on x570, it means that PCIe 4.0 makes the chip run hotter.Basically, PCIe 4.0 could introduce risk of failling hardware. It would be totally irresponsible from AMD to go backward entirely. Yes, it kind of blow, but at least your mobo will not die because the hardware was not designed fot it.
nevcairiel - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
The chipset was always going to stay PCIe 3.0 anyway on older boards, it cannot magically grow a PCIe 4.0 controller - and thats what is running hot. The dedicated PCIe slots directly connected to the CPU without any intermediate chips where the only to even have a chance to support PCIe 4.0 on older boards.cowboy44mag - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
I don't really see this as being a huge issue for a lot of people. I know that PCIe 4.0 will give much more bandwith to M.2 SSD devices, however most people were really hoping for a boost in GPU performance. That's not going to happen till at least 2020. The most powerful GPUs on the market don't support PCIe 4.0 because Nvidia chose to give the RTX chips a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 bus interface, even though the PCI-Express gen 4.0 specification was expected. AMD's new GPUs will take advantage of PCIe 4.0 however they are expected to only compete against the RTX 2060, RTX 2070, possibly the RTX 2080. That means that the very best gaming GPUs will still be the RTX 2080Ti and Titan, neither of which have native support for PCIe 4.0. By in large the most popular GPUs in use are the GTX 1000 series and they will of course have no native support either.By the time that AMD has a truly worthy high end GPU on PCIe 4.0 and Nvidia releases their next gen GPUs with PCIe 4.0 native support we will all be awaiting the release of X670 motherboards and Zen 2+. PCIe 4.0 in this generation is a "nice to have" feature but far from practical. As long as the 3000 series processors perform just as good on X470 as on X570 I see no reason to upgrade to X570 when the only real difference will be PCIe 4.0 support.
sing_electric - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Totally agreed - PCIe 4.0 would have meant more on an SSD than on an x16 slot, and the layouts of most boards meant that adding PCIe 4 to the m2 slots of an older board was almost certainly out of the question. MAYBE for someone who wants to do GPU compute stuff, but if you're spending enough money to buy a Radeon Instinct (or something), the cost of a new motherboard is basically a rounding error in your build cost.Ferro_Giconi - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
It won't matter anyway, even if a device is PCIe 4.0. Graphics cards already don't use the full bandwidth of 3.0, and anyone who is going to spend the money on a new CPU to get 4.0 and the money on a device that actually makes use of 4.0 speeds, a new $100 motherboard is going to be a drop in a hat compared to the CPU and 4.0 device that actually uses 4.0 speeds.FreckledTrout - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
There are M.2. SSD's being shown off at computex already making use of PCIE 4.0 speeds. So it might matter to content developers or anyone where mex sequential IO throughput matters. For graphics cards its pointless at least today. I certainly will be skipping over this generation as long as x370 motherboards don't take any performance hit with Ryzen 3000 CPU's.cowboy44mag - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Depends on the graphics card that is utilized. I have seen the RTX 2080 Titan fully saturate PCIe 3.0 and I believe that the RTX 2080Ti can as well. Its not easy to get them to do so and most normal applications or gaming isn't going to push those monster cards that hard, but it is possible. The biggest problem with PCIe 4.0 in respects to current graphics cards is simply that the highest end graphics cards available don't support PCIe 4.0, making the technology moot until the next gen of graphics cards launch that will have PCIe 4.0 native support.sing_electric - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Given that all of the previous X-series chipsets have only appeared on ATX (or larger) boards, it means that potential Ryzen 3000 series customers who wanted to build a smaller system (mATX or ITX, etc.) are now forced to decide between waiting to build until the B-series is released, or buying an older board and forgoing PCIe 4.0 support. If you planned on holding on to the system for a while, that could be an issue, particularly for SSDs (there's a surprising number of mATX boards that have 2 m2 slots, making a new, faster SSD an easy drop-in upgrade).JMC2000 - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
"Given that all of the previous X-series chipsets have only appeared on ATX (or larger) boards..."The ROG STRIX X370-I/X470-I, ASRock X370/X470 Gaming ITX/AC would like to have words with you; not to mention the upcoming ASUS and ASRock MiniITX/MiniDTX boards.
cowboy44mag - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/ROG-Crosshair-VI...That a lot of power in a small package!!
WaltC - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Makes sense, and no one who bought an x370/x470 motherboard expected to get PCIe4.x support from it. People don't also realize that PCIe4.x lanes from the x370/x470 chipset would require the x570 chipset anyway. At best you might have seen some problematic support for pcie4.x from the cpu in an x370/x470--maybe. Better to confine it to x570 chipset--drawing ~11W I hear, versus the x470 which draws ~5W.sknaumov - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
Does someone know whether improved memory support depends only on processor or motherboard is also significantly involved from hardware point of view? Will it be enough to update BIOS on older motherboards to enjoy compatibility with higher clocked DDR4?cowboy44mag - Monday, June 3, 2019 - link
The processor has a role to play but from my experience the motherboard plays a much larger role in memory support, and that is at a hardware level. X570 will doubtless have better memory support than X470, which has better support than X370. While bios updates can help, the only way to truly support higher overclocks on the memory is with hardware improvements. In short bios updates are software and we have already seen that X370 can't support the same memory speeds as X470, so logically X470 won't be able to have as high memory clocks as X570 no matter what bios updates come out.X570 is supposed to support 3200Mhz right out of the box and is supposed to be able to support up to 5000Mhz, which is insane. With my X470-F Strix I am running 3200Mhz GSkill (Samsung B die) @ 3600Mhz CL14 with very tight sub timings. While it is possible that I might be able to squeeze a little more out of it with a X570 board the memory itself is already pushing its upper limits so realistically I won't see anymore RAM performance on X570 than I am already getting on X470 without buying 3600, 4000Mhz RAM+ which is almost as expensive as buying a new motherboard.
Until RAM prices drop for 4000+Mhz RAM the improved memory support of the X570 motherboards is again nice to have, but cost preventative. These new boards will have a lot of nice "future proof" qualities, but at the same time by the time that M.2 SSDs that can support PCIe 4.0 drop in price and 4000+ Mhz RAM drops in price the next gen X670 boards will be soon to release bringing some other new feature.
I'd say if you already have a quality X470 board that there really isn't a reason to upgrade to X570 unless you have tons of money to throw at the very latest and fastest M.2 SSDs and RAM.
Threska - Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - link
Is speed the sole benefit that PCIe 4.0 brings?https://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/what-pcie-40
Westmassguy - Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - link
Re-read the 3rd paragraph. AMD never said older motherboards would be upgraded via a BIOS update. It was speculated, then magically became fact? It was expected because of all the speculation.Bensam123 - Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - link
Silly. Part of the PC consumer space is finding that rare gem that does something others don't and then getting to brag about it. I don't think there are going to be many people hunting down older x470 boards for new builds to get PCIE 4.0. But people on older boards will be happy with added support. Bad move AMD, I'm sure the modding community will take care of it.