The quirky cats at Asrock have provide you with one other offbeat thought. Including a second chipset to an AMD motherboard through a PCIe add-in card. Yup, actually. The place to begin is an ASRock B650 LiveMixer (opens in new tab) board to which a second AM5-spec chipset is added to the setup utilizing an additional board adapter. Genius, proper? Kinda.
Quite a few caveats ensue, and finally this can be a recipe for spending extra money that you’d have on the X670 motherboard within the first place, solely to have the X670 chipset bit hobbled by the PCIe interface. However maintain that thought.
As Level1Techs clarify (opens in new tab), the entire thought hinges on the truth that the AMD AM5 platform can assist a number of chipsets both immediately linked to the CPU or through daisychaining. That is the way it differentiates between X670 and B650 (opens in new tab) motherboards, one has two chipsets dies and the finances model only one. So, ASRock determined so as to add a second chipset through a PCIe add-in card.
The X670 growth equipment contains an add-in board with twin quad-lane M.2 SSD ports, a 10Gbps ethernet port, three USB-A 10Gbps ports, one 10Gbps USB-C ports and two SATA sockets.
The entire thing runs over a quad-lane PCIe 4.0 interface. In order that’s a theoretical 8GB/s of accessible bandwidth, which interprets into 64Gbps of peak theoretical throughput. A single M.2 drive may saturate your entire hyperlink for the cardboard, so there’s a lot of potential for bandwidth competition.
It is also vital to notice that the cardboard cannot be used on any previous AM5 motherboard. You want a particular version of the LiveMixer board with a J2 header. The cardboard does not simply run over the PCIe interface.
The add-in card can be not, so far as we are able to glean, on the market in any case. For now it is extra of an engineering proof of idea.
As a means so as to add options, most notably 10Gbps ethernet, it is intriguing at first look. Add in just a few extra options like a sound card and abruptly you will have an inexpensive add-in board that may flip a server right into a workstation.
For regular PC customers and avid gamers, like we mentioned it is a funky method to spend extra in whole than an X670 board would price simply to have a hobbled X670 implementation. So probably not a goer. However we salute ASRock for its signature outside-the-box pondering all the identical.
