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X670E vs 870e

I

Ikarus1980

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Nov 27, 2024
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Hello everyone :)
I’ve been reading your amazing articles for days and now I need your help. I own an Asus 4070 Ti super, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and an Asus TUF 650 Plus. I’d like to buy an X670E or X870E motherboard. I read that the X870E boards share the PCIe lanes. Since I’m not very familiar with this, I could really use your support :)
I’m looking for a white motherboard or one with white accents. Do you know of any suitable options? 🙂 Greetings from germany 🙂

Gigabyte AORUS Pro ICE AMD X870E is this a top Option? 🤔​

 
I want to prepare my white build for the upcoming 5000 series Nvidia cards. Therefore, I would like to replace the motherboard.
 
The main, most important difference between the X670E and X870E are the (silly, IMHO) requirement that the latter offer USB4/Thunderbolt ports. Effectively, this means that PCIe lanes that might have been dedicated to m.2/NVMe or proper PCIe slots must instead be allocated to USB4. As a consequence, it is increasingly the case on X870E (and X870) boards that the PCIe and m.2 slots are shared and if one is in use the other cannot be (e.g., if m.2 #3 is used then the PCIe x4 slot cannot be). This does also happen with X670/X670E boards, seemingly not quite to the same extent.

Your system appears to be very new and perfectly good for even a lot of 4K gaming. Seems silly to throw $2500+ at a new build so soon. It's not possible to know for sure yet, but it seems unlikely that the RTX 5000 cards will offer enough of an uplift to warrant an upgrade from the 4000 cards.
 
I just went with an X870E Aorus Pro and 9800X3D. I went with the black version, but I believe it's the same other than the color, so I'm in a good position to give specifics about that board.

First of all, it is important to understand that X670E and X870E are literally the same chipset. I don't mean the same specifications, I mean literally the same silicon. USB4 is a requirement for boards that are branded as X870E, but the actual USB4 controller is a 3rd party controller that is not part of the chipset.

As mentioned, the USB4 controller does require some PCIe lanes. This is less of an issue with X870E, which has a fairly large number of PCIe Lanes when you include lanes from the southbridge, compared to X870 (Which lacks the southbridge since it's actually just B650 + USB4).

In the case of the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro, you have 4 M.2 slots. The top M.2 slot is your main no-compromise PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. The #2 and #4 M.2 slots are also PCIe 5.0, but share bandwidth with the 16x PCIe slot (GPU), meaning that your GPU will run at 8x if you put an M.2 drive in either or both the #2 or #4 M.2 slot. The #3 M.2 slot uses dedicated lanes from the southbridge, but only operates at PCIe 4.0 speeds. So in my case, I put my M.2 SSDs in the #1 and #3 M.2 slots, my GPU is running at full 16X bandwidth, and everything is great.

While I can see how it might be annoying to have two of the M.2 slots share bandwidth with the main PCIe GPU slot, it was a non-issue for me because I've really never felt the need to load up a desktop motherboard with tons of M.2 drives. And, of course, if you really wanted to add more M.2 drives without dropping the primary PCIe GPU slot from 16x to 8x, you could always buy a cheap PCIe to M.2 adapter and use one of the two regular PCIe slots, which don't share bandwidth with anything.

You will have to decide if USB4 is worth it to you. I personally like USB4 a lot, and it was a big selling point for me, mainly due to the built-in thunderbolt support. I like having potent external connectivity options, and the 40Gbps that USB4/Thunderbolt offers is extremely potent. It helps keep options open when looking at things like external high-speed Ethernet adapters or external SSD enclosures that don't compromise on speed compared to internal equivalents.
 
Ikarus1980 said:
Hello everyone :)
I’ve been reading your amazing articles for days and now I need your help. I own an Asus 4070 Ti super, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and an Asus TUF 650 Plus. I’d like to buy an X670E or X870E motherboard. I read that the X870E boards share the PCIe lanes. Since I’m not very familiar with this, I could really use your support :)
I’m looking for a white motherboard or one with white accents. Do you know of any suitable options? 🙂 Greetings from germany 🙂

Gigabyte AORUS Pro ICE AMD X870E is this a top Option? 🤔​

Click to expand...
X670 and X870 are the exact same silicon. X870 is simply a rebrand/refresh of the boards (so you get newere wifi, more 5GB ethernet options, etc). And AMD mandated that USB 4 be added as a feature. this is accomplished by added 3rd party USB4 controllers. It is not natively added to the chipset. So, these extra controllers must share the lanes offered by the chipset.
 
GotNoRice said:
No, X670E and X870E are the same silicon. X670 has no 800-series equivalent, but has more in common with X870E than X870. X870 is a re-branded B650E with USB4.
Click to expand...

It's all the same chip. The X670s and X870s are really just two B650s, one hanging off the other. MSI's blog even has a table:

x870-20240923-1.jpg


So both you and chameleoneel are correct.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
It's all the same chip. The X670s and X870s are really just two B650s, one hanging off the other.
Click to expand...

The X870 only has one - just like the B650. The B650E was the later revision which has PCIe 5.0 support. They added the USB4 requirement and B650E became X870.

That is why moving from an X670 to an X870 board is actually a downgrade in some cases (not to be confused with X670E vs X870E). I notice that AMD omitted B650E from that graph, probably because it would make their sleazy B650E -> X870 rebrand too obvious
 
People complicate this. They're all Promontory 21 chips, you just get two of them in some cases. There is no performance benefit based entirely if you have one or two of them and there is no performance benefit for 600 vs. 800. Its a rename and some stipulations that USB4 should be included.

Ikarus1980 you've not really given any reason that anything over B650 would benefit you so why do you feel like you need a new motherboard?

1732889039183.png


GotNoRice said:
sleazy B650E -> X870 rebrand too obvious
Click to expand...

Simply eliminating a useless product from the product stack and combining it, not everything needs to be malicious but its up to the person I suppose if they want to see it that way.
 
Never occurred to me that if I upgrade, will need to figure out m.2 drive placement to not screw the GPU. I mean, GPUs should be plenty fine really, x16 vs x8 was never really the bottleneck, but still wouldn't feel good imo.
 
Last edited:
Sir Beregond said:
Never occurred to me that if I upgrade, will need to figure out m.2 drive placement to new screw the GPU. I mean, GPUs should be plenty fine really, x16 vs x8 was never really the bottleneck, but still wouldn't feel good imo.
Click to expand...

Actually there are quite a few variables with M.2 slots. Some have lanes directly from the CPU while others use lanes from the Chipset. Both are fine, but using CPU lanes can slightly cut down on latency so that would be preferable if given the choice. Also, some slots will be PCIe 5.0 capable while others will be limited to PCIe 4.0. Again not a big deal, but if you actually have a PCIe 5.0 capable drive, you'd probably want it in a 5.0 slot if given the choice.
 
GotNoRice said:
The X870 only has one - just like the B650. The B650E was the later revision which has PCIe 5.0 support. They added the USB4 requirement and B650E became X870.

That is why moving from an X670 to an X870 board is actually a downgrade in some cases (not to be confused with X670E vs X870E). I notice that AMD omitted B650E from that graph, probably because it would make their sleazy B650E -> X870 rebrand too obvious
Click to expand...

Yeah, I munged that, meant to type "X670s and X870E".
 
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