Gigabyte removes PCIe 4.0 support on all AMD motherboards that are not X570
There has been said and written a lot about PCIe Gen 4.0 support on Series 300 and 400 chipset based motherboards from AMD.
One of the first companies that created a viral in an effort to draw attention was Gigabyte, who introduced a Firmware BIOS switch in their X470 motherboards allowing you to enable PCIe Gen 4.0 (partially). Once that happened a lot of motherboard manufacturers felt obligated to follow. Meanwhile, AMD has been stating that non-500 series motherboards will not get PCIe Gen 4.0 support.
Check out what is happening at the support pages of Gigabyte, they are now removing PCIe Gen 4.0 support from their products starting with the new AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB BIOS update. Bios version F42a and later is specifically removing support. Gigabyte is listing the withdrawal of the feature with chipsets from X370 and X470 to B350, B450, and A320.
As to why support is removed is not explained.
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Im sure others will do the same thing. Amd needs to sell x570 boards somehow.
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As to why support is removed is not explained but we're sure that purchasers of a Gigabyte motherboard will not be happy about this and in the future move towards another brand.
This is an error we are correcting. Pre-X570 boards will not support PCIe Gen 4. There's no guarantee that older motherboards can reliably run the more stringent signaling requirements of Gen4, and we simply cannot have a mix of "yes, no, maybe" in the market for all the older motherboards. The potential for confusion is too high.
When final BIOSes are released for 3rd Gen Ryzen (AGESA 1000+), Gen4 will not be an option anymore. We wish we could've enabled this backwards, but the risk is too great.
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So boards capable of PCIe 4.0 are being forced to use lower PCIe standard. Is this an attempt to force users to upgrade to newer tech or am I missing something.
I though AMD was the nice company and Nvidia/Intel the evil ones.
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This is an error we are correcting. Pre-X570 boards will not support PCIe Gen 4. There's no guarantee that older motherboards can reliably run the more stringent signaling requirements of Gen4, and we simply cannot have a mix of "yes, no, maybe" in the market for all the older motherboards. The potential for confusion is too high.
When final BIOSes are released for 3rd Gen Ryzen (AGESA 1000+), Gen4 will not be an option anymore. We wish we could've enabled this backwards, but the risk is too great.
Somehow this AMD philosophy doesn't extend to CPUs and GPUs: It's all up to your luck if your particular unit happens to overclock well or poorly.
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Gigabyte had no choice but to remove this. AMD practically forced them. AMD has full control over the AGESA, they don't let manufacturers modify it at all. So with a new update, they basically forced PCIe 4.0 to be unavailable in AGESA, and any board vendor that wants to update to it (and they really should want to), is simply forced to discontinue PCIe 4.0 on 300 or 400 series boards.
Its really their own fault for starting a marketing thing for PCIe4.0 contrary to AMDs wishes. Now they are left in a position where it has to be discontinued. And any other vendors that tried to do the same thing will also have to remove it not before long.