Question B550 chipset, so AMD joins the dark side after all.

[Shivansps]

I just read the article...

So let me get this straight, this chipset is coming out like a year later, they did not even bother to add CPU PCI-E 4.0 uplink support or to increase the number of sata ports that is ALREADY a problem on every 6 sata B450 motherboard (NVME x4 disables the 2 SOC Sata, thus 6 sata B450 mbs losses 2 sata if NVME is used), and they even dare to futher reduce backguard compatibility?

I was not expecting for the PCI-E lanes FROM the chipset to be 4.0, but only USB 3.2 G2, no more satas, CPU link still 3.0 and the PCI-E lanes 3.0 is beyond disappointing.

 

[beginner99]

Anyone seen a B550 board that *actually* has 8x/8x split of the 16x 4.0 lanes? This looks like a fake feature so far, in that I haven't seen a single board that actually implements it. Shouldn't really be surprised as it was kind of a half fake feature of x570 as well since most boards ran 16x/4x electrical chipset.

Agree. All the cheap x570 boars are 16/4 as well with the 4 from the chipset and not cpu. Realistically it doesn't really matter as mGPU is dead but then I like being on the save side as $100 more doesn't really bother me mutch especially because that often also adds bios reflash which I learned with Ryzen is something you really do need.

 

[LightningZ71]

The idea of bifurcating that x16 channel has a lot of uses outside of mGPU. For anyone that's not looking for bleeding edge video performance, sticking a cheap video card in an x1 slot allows you to have a pair of x8 channels with full bandwidth for other I/O cards. I admit that it's not a common use case, but it is a real one.

 

[Shivansps]

I use dual video cards on my pci passthrough rigs, I've never actually run sli. 8x/8x is better for this then running the secondary card through the overloaded chipset. If I wanted to deal with that I'd use Intel. I expected these boards to do 8x/8x on the first two slots with many of them coming with a chipset driven third, which x470 boards are, but not the more expensive b550 or x570 except in the $300 area?

m.2 split doesn't require b550 AFAIK, there's an asus b450 strix board that already does it. Every board I looked at for b550 seemed to just use pcie 3.0 from the chipset for secondary m.2 slots.

So far I just think these are not worth the price, but you can't find any boards these days so its hard to tell what the final price will be. We'll see if there are any pleasant surprises when the come out but I think I'm going to keep an eye out for a x470 board. For me personally, the support for old chips combined with 8x/8x split seem more valuable than pcie 4.0. I'm a niche case though.

Yeah the issue is that no one does the 8/8 split anymore due to SLI/CF being dead, thats the only use case OEM are going to consider for the consumer market. For your usage i would recomend going X570, as long you use PCI-E 3.0 on the 2nd slot and a Zen2 or better (not Renoir as it seems to be 3.0 acording to B550 manuals) CPU you are not going to overload the chipset due to the 4.0 uplink.

You are unlike to find the 8/8 split on x570 due to having to support Picasso were only first x8 wiring is avalible. You are going to have better luck on B550 due to being designed for Renoir that has full x16, but unless there is a specific SLI/CF model i doubt it.

 

[PingSpike]

The idea of bifurcating that x16 channel has a lot of uses outside of mGPU. For anyone that's not looking for bleeding edge video performance, sticking a cheap video card in an x1 slot allows you to have a pair of x8 channels with full bandwidth for other I/O cards. I admit that it's not a common use case, but it is a real one.

Agreed, not a common use case...but it looks like you have to buy a $300 gaming board for your home NAS. If you look at many of the boards you'll find if you use any of the 1x slots it often drops the 16x slot to 1x as well. Its a very odd choice to me since its like they added a second GPU slot and then didn't actually implement it.

Again, I'm just whining about my niche use case. But this 8x/8x split was one of the few new features on the list when these boards were unveiled. I have to assume the physical wiring is more expensive and with the death of SLI it just isn't worth implementing this feature even if it comes for free.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Newegg's rotating front-page banner ad, with the B550 chipset/mobo release:

B550 | Newegg.com

At the bottom of that page, they have "show compatible processors". Which I believed was just Zen2, right? Or is Zen+ APU (3200G, 3400G, 3000G) also supported, but not Zen+ CPU?

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

They show the lowly Athlon 3000G as compatible! How strange...

 

[Shivansps]

Newegg's rotating front-page banner ad, with the B550 chipset/mobo release:

B550 | Newegg.com

At the bottom of that page, they have "show compatible processors". Which I believed was just Zen2, right? Or is Zen+ APU (3200G, 3400G, 3000G) also supported, but not Zen+ CPU?

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

They show the lowly Athlon 3000G as compatible! How strange...

The likely answer here is that they probably have every 3XXX cpu in a category named "Ryzen 3er gen" and they added that as compatible. This is what happens when your naming system is bad and you try to cut retrocompatibility.

 

[podspi]

They should probably just skip 4xxx desktop series CPUs and launch Zen 3 as 5xxx CPU+APU.

I understand why they did what they did, but now that they have more resources they really should try to synchronize the CPU and APU lines.

 

[JustMe21]

They should probably just skip 4xxx desktop series CPUs and launch Zen 3 as 5xxx CPU+APU.

I understand why they did what they did, but now that they have more resources they really should try to synchronize the CPU and APU lines.

I think they need to get their chiplet version of an APU working so they could do an APU and for ones with failed video, offer it as a non APU version. They definitely need to get their APUs at the same generation level as the non APUs.