In its financial report for the second quarter of 2022, AMD announced the release date for the Ryzen 7000 processor and RX 7000 graphics card series. Along with this, new AM5 motherboards have also emerged that will introduce users to an abundance of USB ports.
USB ports galore for new AM5 motherboards!
AMD said it will announce the next-generation Ryzen 7000 family and Radeon 7000 graphics card series in September. Ryzen 700 CPUs will go on sale in the second week of September, while RX 7000 models will be available before January 2023.
On the other hand, AM5 motherboards that excite with the number of USB ports are already ready and waiting to be released. We see the first examples of this on the ASUS X670e series motherboards in the image above. Many brands such as ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI and Biostar also introduced models with similar designs.
When we take a closer look at the image, we see that there are two 40 Gbps USB 4.0 Type-C ports. In addition, there is a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C output. In addition, there are 9 more outputs in total, including 8 USB 3.2 Type-A and 1 USB 3.2 Type-C. These ports support the highest speed of 10 Gbps.
On the surface of the motherboard, there are two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and five NVMe M.2 slots, four of which are PCIe 5.0. On the Ethernet side, there are two options, one supporting 10 Gbps and the other 2.5 Gbps. In addition, RGB and overclocking controllers are also included.
If we look at the whole support offered with other motherboards, AMD AM5 is now fully adapting to PCIe 5.0. There are 28 PCI lanes in total, of which 16 are used for a single x16 PCIe slot. Of course, it is also possible to see it as 2×8.
Of course, it should be noted that both 4.0 and 5.0 technologies are supported on the PCIe connection side. Because users who want PCIe 5.0 have no choice but to turn to X670E motherboards for now. However, this situation will change in the future and the options will increase.
In addition, the new Zen 4 series has 8 more general-purpose lines. We see that at least 4 of them are reserved for M.2 type SSDs (gen 5.0). The other 4 lines are left to the choice of motherboard manufacturers. But in general, we predict that it will appear as Thunderbolt 4 (Intel Goshen Ridge JHL8440) and USB 4 (ASMedia ASM4242).
On the other hand, we know that the new Ryzen 7000 series uses integrated GPUs (those who want to prefer these chips instead of APUs can click on the link above). In this way, new AM5 socket motherboards will also support HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.0. In addition, there will be 4 different ports for image transfer.
In addition, there are four USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps and at least 1 Type-C output) and at least one USB 2.0 port. The remaining 4 PCIe lines will be used to connect the chip. Of course, as we mentioned, at this point, although the processor supports PCE-Express 5.0, the chips come with PCIe 4.0. Accordingly, the result you will get will be in Gen 4 quality.
AMD is known to work with ASMedia to create a single chipset called Promontory 21 in AM5. This chip offers 16 PCI-Express lanes. Four of them are used to connect to the CPU via Gen 4 as we said before.
On the X670 and X670Es, the secondary chipset is connected to the primary chipset. So it has no direct connection with the processor. This means that the other four lanes are used in the primary chipset, leaving eight free PCIe lanes. So the secondary chipset has 12 available PCIe lanes.
So here we see that there is some room left for motherboard manufacturers to do whatever they want. For example, ASRock prefers 8 SATA ports at this point. But in general, we see that other manufacturers prefer 6 pieces each.
To summarize, the B650 series motherboards will have a total of eight available PCIe 4.0 lanes and four PCIe 3.0 or SATA (6 Gbps) connections. The X670 and X670E series motherboards will have 12 PCIe 4.0 lanes and up to 8 PCIe 3.0 or SATA (6 Gbps) connections.
Finally, in a new post by AMD today, some features were shown along with an image of the AM5 platform. Chief among these was the native support up to 170W, and the new socket would be compatible with older AM4 coolers.
What do you think about this subject? Don’t forget to share your views with us in the comments!
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