To add to this, in conference call yesterday AMD outright denied those rumors and re-re-reconfirmed Zen 3 being on schedule for 2020 launch
- Status
hoom
Veteran
What do we make of B550 chipset?
At first glance 'downgraded to PCIE3' sounds problematic
But looking at the diagram I think Its not actually really a problem:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1585...-overview-asus-gigabyte-msi-asrock-and-others
There's still a 16* Gen4 & NVMe etc direct off the CPU.
I'm never going to put a 2nd GPU in & only recently got my first NVMe, everything else I use won't come close to maxing that other IO -> its actually looking very reasonable for my relatively limited budget.
Am I missing something?
Hopefully its not going to be one of those situations where it doesn't support all turbo modes or something
At first glance 'downgraded to PCIE3' sounds problematic
But looking at the diagram I think Its not actually really a problem:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1585...-overview-asus-gigabyte-msi-asrock-and-others
There's still a 16* Gen4 & NVMe etc direct off the CPU.
I'm never going to put a 2nd GPU in & only recently got my first NVMe, everything else I use won't come close to maxing that other IO -> its actually looking very reasonable for my relatively limited budget.
Am I missing something?
Hopefully its not going to be one of those situations where it doesn't support all turbo modes or something
No, you're not. It all boils down to how much I/O bandwidth you need. In general, I'd even say pretty much no-one really needs a X570 at the moment, it may have notable benefits to some specialized cases (either crapton of SSDs or really heavy network traffic) but that's about it.What do we make of B550 chipset?
At first glance 'downgraded to PCIE3' sounds problematic
But looking at the diagram I think Its not actually really a problem:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1585...-overview-asus-gigabyte-msi-asrock-and-others
There's still a 16* Gen4 & NVMe etc direct off the CPU.
I'm never going to put a 2nd GPU in & only recently got my first NVMe, everything else I use won't come close to maxing that other IO -> its actually looking very reasonable for my relatively limited budget.
Am I missing something?
Hopefully its not going to be one of those situations where it doesn't support all turbo modes or something
That said I have no regrets getting X570 myself even though I don't really need it, heck, I doubt my experience would be any different even with B350 since I doubt RX 5700 XT would really perform any worse on PCIe3 x16 link
Depends on motherboard, but only one PCIe4 x4 unless you sacrifice x16 to x8
Last edited:
Expandable NVMe storage is one area where consoles will have an advantage over PC's next gen (which is ironic given the PC's strength is supposed to be it's expandability). This has never been a real problem before, but with the still very high price of high speed PCIe 4 drives in large capacities, and the incoming influx of very large games which may require an NVMe drive (at least to run at their full potential) then I see it becoming a problem for a lot of people quite quickly. An extra 4 PCIe lanes on the CPU to allow for 2x PCIe 4 4x drives would help with this.
If there currently any way to turn the internal M2 slot into an externally accessible slot via some kind of adapter? I wouldn't fancy having to open up my case every time I want to swap SSD's.
If there currently any way to turn the internal M2 slot into an externally accessible slot via some kind of adapter? I wouldn't fancy having to open up my case every time I want to swap SSD's.
Yes, there is for PCIe 3.0, Thunderbolt can carry 4 lanes, USB4 will make it more widely available since Intel still isn't fan of manufacturers supporting TB on AMD platforms
Wouldn't it be easier to use the existing PCI-E slots? You can already get PCI-E cards that can accept one or more NVMe SSD cards, it may be possible to re-engineer those to enable the SSDs to be slotted in from the outside.
Possible for sure, but then you either can't have cooler built-in on the SSD or need to cut holes in your case because those slots in the back aren't that tall.
I'm not entirely sure how it works. I know the system will automatically link the PCIe 16x slot to the CPU lanes but how does it allocate the NVMe drive? I'd assumed it just defaults those 4 extra lanes to the M2 slot.
There's one x16 and one x4 link on the CPU, x4 gets wired to M.2 slot and x16 to x16 slot. If the chipset allows PCIe bifurcation (even when the chipset doesn't really have anything to do with those lines), you can split the x16 to x8/x8 etc.
B550 allows complete PCIe bifurcation (not supported on earlier B-series), which means if the motherboard manufacturer so chooses, they can split the x16 for more NVMe slots too.
Without bifurcation support you could IIRC still split it, but you'd lose some lanes in the process (like B450 splitting x16 into x8/x4 or something like that)
Yeah that's what I'd assumed. So that means if you use an SSD on a PCIe add-in card you're using the chipset lanes rather than the CPU lanes (unless it's a 16x card using the graphics slot) which will impact bandwidth and latency. Probably not a good thing if you need the highest possible IO throughput to keep pace with the consoles.
Unless the board supports pcie bifurcation like X-series or B550, then you could have gfx using x8 in x16 slot and still get two full x4 M.2's in add-in card (or as additional slots on the motherboard) ((assuming of course the motherboard manufacturer implemented it that way))
In normal use it apparently doesn't really matter if you stick the M.2 directly to CPU lanes or via chipset, even though via chipset you need to share the final x4 link to CPU with everything else there's no real performance difference. IIRC at least some motherboard manufacturers actually suggest you to install the NVMe SSD (if you have only one) to chipset linked slot simply because it's further away from your graphics card (which is hot, making everything around it hotter too, which can lead to the SSD throttling), and the penalty is in normal use non-existent. On B550, however, this would limit you to PCIe 3 SSD, but on X570 you get PCIe 4 on chipset too
I mean that is still fine. My board right now is 1 pcie-3 4x and 1 m.2 sata for drives. I wont upgrade till they put out ddr 5 but I could take my 1TB nvme wd black drive and then a pcie-4 4x drive and make that sata m.2 an external or something. That's a lot more speed from my storage.
I'm still hopefully that there is a faster sata in the works for internal 3.5 inch drives. 1200MB sata would be a nice bump up and could be great in the future as a storage drive
Fastest HDDs our there can't saturate even half of SATA3, so no need for that, and SATA SSDs just don't make sense anymore.
Currently fastest is supposedly Barracuda Pro 12TB which reaches 250MB/s sustained performance, while SATA3 goes up to 600MB/s
Why doesn't a sata ssd make sense ? Its an easy way for me to add storage for things that don't require the full speed of pci-e 4 or even 3 but I would still like it to be faster than a mechanical drive.
I currently have a wd black nvme 1TB a wd blue m.2 sata 1TB , a 750gig corasiar ssd and a 256 gig transend ssd. I am hoping during black Friday I can get a 1TB ssd for around $80 and replace my 256 gig ssd. That right now is my OS drive. I would use the 750gig corsair drive as my OS / Office drive and the 1TB as my gaming drive. Oh I also have a 500gig ssd that I put vr stuff on and my page file.
I wouldn't mind something twice the speed of sata to replace it.
Because you can just as well use PCIe SSDs instead of SATA SSDs, even PCIe 3.0 x2 link offers more bandwidth than two SATA links put together
I can have a lot more sata drives than I have pcie slots and connectors ? I have 8 sata connectors , 1 nvme m.2 and 1 sata m.2. Also motherboards are only so big , so it sounds like i'd be greatly limited by that
One has to wonder how large obstacle the 4lane pcie4 bus between chipset and io-die is for zen2 based systems? If the data being read has to go from disk/network to cpu/gpu it looks like single fast nvme ssd could hog all the chipset to io-controller bandwidth and leave nothing for rest of the system.
It feels odd how few pcie4 lanes gaming cpu's get. It's definitely possible to have much more as shown by threadripper. Maybe the move is to use only 8x pcie4 lanes for gpu and then connect 2 nvme ssd's to regular pcie slots(can it be configured this way?). Leave chipset for networking/legacy storage/slow usb devices that hopefully will not overload the 4lane pcie4 bus. Network traffic etc. flows via chipset so having ssd's and fast USB devices connected directly to cpu(not chipset) might make system performance marginally more stable/performant.
It would be interesting thing to benchmark motherboards once we have real fast pcie4 ssd's available.
It also looks like sata and nvme is not additive when considering bandwidth/connectivity
It feels odd how few pcie4 lanes gaming cpu's get. It's definitely possible to have much more as shown by threadripper. Maybe the move is to use only 8x pcie4 lanes for gpu and then connect 2 nvme ssd's to regular pcie slots(can it be configured this way?). Leave chipset for networking/legacy storage/slow usb devices that hopefully will not overload the 4lane pcie4 bus. Network traffic etc. flows via chipset so having ssd's and fast USB devices connected directly to cpu(not chipset) might make system performance marginally more stable/performant.
It would be interesting thing to benchmark motherboards once we have real fast pcie4 ssd's available.
It also looks like sata and nvme is not additive when considering bandwidth/connectivity
Last edited:
- Status
