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X670E vs X870E - Buy 670 now or wait for 870?
- Thread starter djoye
- Start date
It seems pretty sad to me that if you want to use more than 2 M.2 ssd's, that you're forced into x8 mode for your graphics card. Are there any good x870E mb's that aren't that way??
ETA: Another thing to watch out for. If the video card slot is moved down, like the Strix X870E-E, your video card support bracket might not work anymore (like the gigabyte bracket supplied for my 4090).
ETA: Another thing to watch out for. If the video card slot is moved down, like the Strix X870E-E, your video card support bracket might not work anymore (like the gigabyte bracket supplied for my 4090).
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BlueLineSwinger
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There are trade-offs to be made here. Maxing out the SATA means reducing the number of USB ports and/or PCIe lanes. Seeing as SATA devices are effectively on their way out, they decided to concentrate on the ports that have more of a future. The relative few users who need >4 SATA can always drop in a HBA.
Unfortunately block diagrams for pci-e lanes are rare these days, so it can be harder to verify which slots/ports interfere with each other.
I have an Asus proart x670e, it has 4 m2 ports - 2x 5.0 and 2x 4.0. One of the 4.0 ports share lanes with the third pci-e (4.0 x4, although it is full x16 size) slot lowering it to x2 when both are in use.
The first two pci-e (5.0) slots can work as 16x/0X or 8x/8x.
An undocumented feature of the board is that the first m2 5.0 port (the one above the first pci-e slot) share lanes the USB4 chip.
So you can use, at each end of the spectrum:
1 pci-e 5.0 x16 slot and all 4 m2 ports at full speed
or
2 pci-e 5.0 x8 + 1 pci-e 4.0 x2 slot, 3 m2 ports (2 at full speed, 1 at 4.0 x2) and USB4.
Prince Valiant
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There were only a couple X670E boards with 8 (Taichi and Godlike). I don't know the general quality of Biostar's boards but looks like their 870E board is the only decent compromise available with 6xSATA and 3 PCIe. I was disappointed by the lane assignments on X670E boards but the only alternative was spending more or going with Intel.
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MrGuvernment
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Even the E ones seems to lack...
Gigabyte X870E AORUS PRO ICE
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X870E-AORUS-PRO-ICE/sp#sp
GotNoRice
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X870E is literally THE SAME chipset as X670E.
X870E only differentiates itself because:
-USB4 is now required, however this is done via a separate controller that is not actually part of the X870E chipset. Some X670E boards actually have USB4 using this same controller already.
-"Better EXPO support" / support for higher-speed memory. No one yet is sure what this actually means. The actual memory controller is on the CPU, and the chipset hasn't changed, so the only things left to improve would be things like the BIOS, requirements for the pathing of the traces between the CPU and the memory slots, etc. However actual testing in the reviews I've seen so far don't seem to show that it really supports faster memory than X670E. Even DDR5-8000 is not a guarantee on all boards, and even if you got that to work, it's still not showing a performance improvement over DDR5-6000 in most cases.
-WiFi 7 - I swear that I originally saw that this was a requirement, like USB4, but it might be optional. Either way, almost all high-end X870E boards seem to have WiFi 7 whereas WiFi 6 or 6E was mostly what was found on X670E.
Obviously the individual layout of each board will come down to the board manufacturer, so linking one motherboard and saying it's PCIe configuration sucks doesn't really say anything about X870E.
According to Steve of Hardware unboxed, they did not had x870e-x870 at the zen5 cpu launch only because
) They knew they would all be expensive, as it is x670 but with high requirement
) Did not want reviewer to use said expensive motherboard in any performance per dollars comparison with Intel and AM4-x670.
) They knew they would all be expensive, as it is x670 but with high requirement
) Did not want reviewer to use said expensive motherboard in any performance per dollars comparison with Intel and AM4-x670.
MrGuvernment
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Good to know, explains why they still have a PCIe 3 slot in there...
So when are the X970E coming out to use all these PCIe lanes the 9 series has
