AMD X370 B350 A320 X300 and B300 / A300 Compared - Only SLI for X370

#5397594 Posted on: 02/24/2017 08:04 PM

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Anyone else find it odd that the SFF chipsets add PCI-Express 3.0 rather then 2.0?

Also, this just confirms what i've been saying about SFF and USB, they do indeed have more then just what the processor gives

#5397603 Posted on: 02/24/2017 08:20 PM

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Yes, I find it very odd, since that info doesn't appear anywhere in the slides from AMD.
Also the source of this chart states: "with X300, B300 and A300 ultimately all based on the A320, the SATA interfaces and PCIe 3.0 lanes being deleted. The PCIe 2.0 lanes are only available if NVMe with 4 × PCIe 3.0 is not available. For this, the four lanes can be output to PCIe 3.0, which come from the CPU."

#5397645 Posted on: 02/24/2017 09:14 PM

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AMD announced six chipsets for Ryzen based on AM4: X370, B350, A320 and the mini ITX X300, B300 and A300 with the X370 and B350 already in pre-order and availibility next month.Â*...

AMD X370 B350 A320 X300 and B300 / A300 Compared - Only SLI for X370

How about chipset comparison to Z270?

#5397664 Posted on: 02/24/2017 10:15 PM

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Yes, I find it very odd, since that info doesn't appear anywhere in the slides from AMD.
Also the source of this chart states: "with X300, B300 and A300 ultimately all based on the A320, the SATA interfaces and PCIe 3.0 lanes being deleted. The PCIe 2.0 lanes are only available if NVMe with 4 × PCIe 3.0 is not available. For this, the four lanes can be output to PCIe 3.0, which come from the CPU."

Looking at it more, if it's true, i can only imagine it's because they are gearing towards more of an APU build then a Ryzen build and that only comes with 10 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes, so the 4 PCI-express 3.0 from the chipset rounds it out a little better then 4 PCI-Express 2.0

#5397666 Posted on: 02/24/2017 10:18 PM

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Will all of these chipsets be able to run a PCI-e 3.0 x 4 M.2 SSD at full speed then?

#5397693 Posted on: 02/24/2017 11:36 PM

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Anyone else find it odd that the SFF chipsets add PCI-Express 3.0 rather then 2.0?

Also, this just confirms what i've been saying about SFF and USB, they do indeed have more then just what the processor gives

It's not odd, all AM4 Cpus are Socs, the X370, B350 and A320 are not true chipsets, they are I/o hubs that consume PCI-E gen3 from the cpu and enable secureBoot in the UEFI, just that; the SFF boards lack the I/O hub, so more PCI-E gen3 lanes are available, the X300 for example its really small and only handle secureBoot and overclocks, the rest is all provided by the CPU on SFFs boards.

#5397734 Posted on: 02/25/2017 01:59 AM

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smear campaign, cheap and dirty.

#5397741 Posted on: 02/25/2017 02:10 AM

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Please elaborate.

#5397761 Posted on: 02/25/2017 02:50 AM

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Back the horses up on this one. This can't be real. You need PCIe 3.0 x4 to run modern M.2 drives and they come close to saturating at max loads. Unless they are going to allocate the remaining 4 lanes from the CPU to run M.2 direct, this would be a problem. Limiting the chipset to old PCIe 2.0 would be eyeroll but not un-amd. AMD has always suffered from reduced storage performance. My bet is this is fake. If real, not a deal breaker but very disappointing.

For anyone wanting to see the Z270 block diagram, here it is: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/images/diagrams/z270-chipset-block-diagram-16x9.png.rendition.intel.web.1072.603.png

edit - actually, now looking again, I see the * on the 20 lanes from the CPU. It drops to 18 if SATA is in use? I guess the suggestions is there are 16 lanes for graphics and 4 left for M.2/U.2, as long as you don't use any SATA ports? If you do then you get x2? Uh.... again I smell fake.

#5397764 Posted on: 02/25/2017 02:57 AM

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....what?

#5397775 Posted on: 02/25/2017 03:28 AM

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Sure:

PCIe 3.0 Lanes - X370 = 0 | Z270 = 24

PCIe 2.0 Lanes - X370 = 8 | Z270 = included in above

PCIe Lanes From CPU - Ryzen = 20x3.0 | I7-7700K = 16x3.0

USB 3.1 Gen 2 - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0

USB 3.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = 10

USB 2.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = 14

SATA 6GBit - X370 = 4 | Z270 = 6

RAID Configuration - X370 = 0/1/10 | Z270 = 0/1/5/10


Intel info taken from:
https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4-50-GHz

and

https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4-50-GHz

#5397793 Posted on: 02/25/2017 05:25 AM

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Hmm... Seems Intel would be the best bet for M2 Ultra/mGPU users.

For single GPU and M2 Ultra, Ryzen looks good but only at X370.

My MB/CPU would not support CFX or SLI with M2 and that was one reason why I got a regular SATA SSD instead so caveat emptor.

#5397799 Posted on: 02/25/2017 06:04 AM

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Back the horses up on this one. This can't be real. You need PCIe 3.0 x4 to run modern M.2 drives and they come close to saturating at max loads. Unless they are going to allocate the remaining 4 lanes from the CPU to run M.2 direct, this would be a problem. Limiting the chipset to old PCIe 2.0 would be eyeroll but not un-amd. AMD has always suffered from reduced storage performance. My bet is this is fake. If real, not a deal breaker but very disappointing.

For anyone wanting to see the Z270 block diagram, here it is: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/images/diagrams/z270-chipset-block-diagram-16x9.png.rendition.intel.web.1072.603.png

edit - actually, now looking again, I see the * on the 20 lanes from the CPU. It drops to 18 if SATA is in use? I guess the suggestions is there are 16 lanes for graphics and 4 left for M.2/U.2, as long as you don't use any SATA ports? If you do then you get x2? Uh.... again I smell fake.

I see you as one of those people who thinks "moar iz better" without any regard as to whether having more or the newest of something will even slightly have any impact on your experience. Consider these:
* There are almost no GPUs out there that saturate PCIe 2.0 @ 8x. A GTX 1080 will lose maybe 10FPS at most. PCIe 2.0 @ 16x has pretty much a negligible performance difference compared to PCIe 3.0 @ 16x, so if you need to run an M.2 SSD, your GPU can easily give up some lanes without sacrificing performance for either device.
* Many motherboards supply 3rd party SATA controllers. If you've got an M.2 drive for performance reasons, then any argument anyone has against 3rd party controllers is irrelevant. Beyond synthetic benchmarks, it doesn't matter anyway.
* The chart says you have to be using more than 2x SATA ports (that the motherboard chipset comes with) in order to dock PCIe lanes. Except for maybe RAID1, why would you care about needing any more than 1 SATA port? If you've got the money for an M.2 drive that can saturate 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes, you've got the money for a multi-TB SATA drive or two, and you probably wouldn't settle for a peasant optical drive, right?
* Not sure where you're getting the impression that this is situation isn't "un-amd". AMD has had plenty of extremely competitive chipsets in the past. My motherboard is from 2010 and supports 3 PCIe 2.0 GPUs at 16x,8x,8x, or 2 GPUs at 16x. Remember what I said about GPUs and PCIe 2.0. In addition to that, it has 6x SATA III ports and USB 3.0. Even by today's standards, that's a very capable chipset.

#5397816 Posted on: 02/25/2017 07:13 AM

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Sure:

PCIe 3.0 Lanes - X370 = 0 | Z270 = 24

PCIe 2.0 Lanes - X370 = 8 | Z270 = included in above

PCIe Lanes From CPU - Ryzen = 20x3.0 | I7-7700K = 16x3.0

USB 3.1 Gen 2 - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0

USB 3.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = 10

USB 2.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = 14

SATA 6GBit - X370 = 4 | Z270 = 6

RAID Configuration - X370 = 0/1/10 | Z270 = 0/1/5/10


Intel info taken from:
https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4-50-GHz

and

https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4-50-GHz



Not exactly correct

one, if you have an X370 motherboard, you'll have to have a CPU which will increase the USB 3.0 to 10, so effectively, the x370 has 10 USB 3.0 as it is literally impossible to have any configuration be less then 10

For two, the Z270 has a max number of USB of 14, and you can have a selection of up to 10 3.0 and up to 14 2.0. Now, does this mean you could have 10 3.0 and 4 2.0? i'm not sure, using the 10 3.0 might take up all of the what the chipset has set aside bandwidth wise for all i know, but lets just say at most if you had 10 3.0 you could only have 4 2.0.

Lets be clear though

X370 chipset total USB (between 3.1, 3.0 and 2.0) = 18

Z27- chipset total USB (between 3.1, 3.0 and 2.0) = 14, not 24 which is what your post implies

Honestly, looking at your "comparison", it's not a useful comparison as it does not include anything that the processors give and you can't run a motherboard without a processor, except you included the PCI-Express aspect of the processors, but didn't include the intel processors that do not provide PCI-Express

A correct version of x370 comparison would be:

PCIe 3.0 Lanes - X370 = 10-20 (APU vs Ryzen) | Z270 = 24-40

PCIe 2.0 Lanes - X370 = 8 | Z270 = 0

PCIe express lanes max - x370 = 18-28 (APU vs Ryzen) | Z270 = 24-40(i3/i5 vs i7)

USB 3.1 Gen 2 - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0

USB 3.0 - X370 = 10 | Z270 = Up to 10

USB 2.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = Up to 14

Total USB - x370 = 18 | Z270 = 14

SATA 6GBit - X370 = 4 | Z270 = 6

SATAe 12GBit - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0(?)

RAID Configuration - X370 = 0/1/10 | Z270 = 0/1/5/10

#5397826 Posted on: 02/25/2017 08:17 AM

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Maybe this makes it a bit more clear