AMD Uncovers a bit more on the X370 chipset

feel less entusiasted...

Put blue in place of red and it might look as an Intel's chipset preview, and not only because of the name scheme.

I was expecting more from AMD (from the X mainly) with all the hype around the company right now.

On other hand it's only about chipset... Company will unlock OC and add more feature with extra chip for sure.

 

Hmmmm, no RAID 5...

 

I was really hoping to see a Quad Channel option.

I know the difference between 2 and 4 channel is not an issue in Most real world applications, not even a difference at all in most cases.

I believe it would make a big difference to some things I personally sometimes do relating to cryptography and was planning on building my next system with a leaning towards this. I've not actually tested the effect of memory bandwidth on such large data sets held in memory, just always pushed for the most bandwidth I could squeeze out of my system.

The option would have been nice to play with though

 

I am just glad that this is looking to be better zen bulldozer.

 

AMD are playing a smart game at the moment and doing very well for it, I hope they keep this momentum

Me too, I am waiting on Zen to hit laptops and choosing a good one for one of my family ...and perhaps one for myself too ^^

 

:3eyes:

looks weird....

then... 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes from Zen and 16 from x370 chipset?

in that case the CPU must provide 24 lanes to the chipset (avoid bottlenecks)

 

It's looking more and more like if you want full featured mITX gonna have to stick with Intel. SMH!

 

There will be some, AMD made the Nano and that really cool looking compact water cooled PC, they will for sure want to produce a fully AMD version of that thing this time out

 

The B350 seems to have all that I really care about. I just hope to see it in mini ITX.

 

X300 is clearly stated to be for SFF. X300 is not full featured.

 

Good point, I overlooked those while assuming board partners would tweak the main chipsets onto a mini ITX board.

Though not full featured as you mention, it looks like it could still get a decent feature set, looks unconfirmed atm. We will see I guess

 

I don't get where the 32 PCIe lanes number is coming from. According to the slides, the CPU provides 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes and the X370 chipset provides 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes. So if you pair a Ryzen processor with a X370 mobo you will have 24 total PCIe lanes, 16 of which are Gen 3 and 8 are Gen 2. Where is the 32 number coming from?

 

PCI-E Disapointment

Wow I'm pretty disapointed in the number of PCI-E lanes here.

So you get PCI-E 3.0 x16 from the CPU - that's your video card.

From the Chipset you get PCI-E 2.0 x8 lanes, which is essentially the equivalent of x4 lanes of 3.0, except obviously it's slower max speed.

That means with a GPU and an NVME drive you're limited to PCI-E 2.0 speeds and an absolute maximum of two drives, with no other add in cards. This is their top of the line enthusiast product?!?


Also I'm confused by the CPU slide - It shows 16 lanes of 3.0, but under I/O it also shows 2 SATA + 1 x2 NVME, 2 SATA + x2 PCIe or simply 1 x4 NVME. So are we really getting 20 PCI-E lanes from the CPU - x16 plus the I/O? If that's the case, then at best you'd get:

GPU at full x16 via processor
x4 3.0 NVME via processor
x8 2.0 via chipset

Either way, that looks pretty underwhelming. 8 core/16 thread CPUs that are completely starved of PCIe 3.0 lanes. Do we know what speed the link is between the chipset and CPU (as in Intel's DMI)?

 

@ChicagoDave
I get the impression this isn't actually their intended enthusiast chipset, but for the time being that's what it is. Their chipsets from 5 years ago were relatively more capable than this.

But supposing you're right about the best case scenario, I don't see the problem. Remember, even if this will be the best chipset AMD will release for a while, it is still plenty sufficient for the target audience, which I'm guessing is enthusiasts on a budget.

There are almost no products out there (including high-end GPUs) that will saturate PCIe 2.0 @ 16x. Most motherboards will evenly divide their PCIe lanes among devices. That being said, in the unlikely event you have two NVME drives (that must halve their bandwidth) and are bottlenecked by synthetic benchmarks, in real-world scenarios you will not see any difference at all.

All that being said, let's use a full-size ATX motherboard as an example. Let's say it has:
* 2x PCIe 3.0 @ 16x (that run at 8x when using two GPUs)
* 4x PCIe 2.0 @ 1x
* 2x M.2 slots @ 4x
* Maybe 1 empty bay above the 1st 16x slot (seems to be common these days)
If you had a dual GPU setup, you would likely have two of your 1x slots covered up (since most GPUs are dual-slot). You use two M.2 SSDs which operate at 2x (again, should have no impact on real-world performance). You use one accessible 1x slot for a discrete sound card, and the other one for wifi. You should have no problems whatsoever running a system without any noticeable bottlenecking, and there are still some PCIe 2.0 lanes to spare.

 

I believe the full CPUs give 2 x 16 lanes.

 

Also only 4 SATA ports I need a minimum of 6 and 8 would be more helpful
2x 120GB SSD's in raid0
4x 2TB HDD's

can't use my BR Drive

If I had unlimited monetary resources I'd replace the HDD's with 1 or 2 big HDD's but I don't have that sorta cash laying round

 

Don't the CPUs themselves have nvme/sata/usb etc? The rest goes to the chipset.

This is Bristol Ridge, but it's using the same B350 chipset:



Zen probably has even more lanes and io on the CPU itself, if anything, io latencies should be significantly reduced.

 

Any more than 4 ports can be catered for by a third party chipset, like has been the case for many years now.

RAID really isn't a consumer feature, and its actual usefulness is much less now than it used to be. The data redundancy of some of the RAID levels may seem 'beneficial', but you have to consider that redundancy comes at the loss of storage space efficiency.

You are running 2x120 GB SSD drives in RAID 0. If one of those drives fails, you lose all your data (well, half, but the remaining data is completely unusable). A modern decent 240+ GB drive would probably perform just as well considering the read/write speeds of the 120 GB. You could argue about putting two 240+ GB drives in RAID 0, but even that isn't a valid argument in 2017. If you really want speed, you go for a PCI-E solution!