AMD X370 B350 A320 X300 and B300 / A300 Compared - Only SLI for X370

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, Feb 24, 2017.

  1. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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  2. Aura89

    Aura89 Ancient Guru

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    Anyone else find it odd that the SFF chipsets add PCI-Express 3.0 rather then 2.0?

    Also, this just confirms what i've been saying about SFF and USB, they do indeed have more then just what the processor gives
     
  3. WareTernal

    WareTernal Master Guru

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    Yes, I find it very odd, since that info doesn't appear anywhere in the slides from AMD.
    Also the source of this chart states: "with X300, B300 and A300 ultimately all based on the A320, the SATA interfaces and PCIe 3.0 lanes being deleted. The PCIe 2.0 lanes are only available if NVMe with 4 × PCIe 3.0 is not available. For this, the four lanes can be output to PCIe 3.0, which come from the CPU."
     
  4. Asgardi

    Asgardi Guest

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  5. Aura89

    Aura89 Ancient Guru

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    Looking at it more, if it's true, i can only imagine it's because they are gearing towards more of an APU build then a Ryzen build and that only comes with 10 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes, so the 4 PCI-express 3.0 from the chipset rounds it out a little better then 4 PCI-Express 2.0
     
  6. will87

    will87 Guest

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    Will all of these chipsets be able to run a PCI-e 3.0 x 4 M.2 SSD at full speed then?
     
  7. ViRGE

    ViRGE Guest

    It's not odd, all AM4 Cpus are Socs, the X370, B350 and A320 are not true chipsets, they are I/o hubs that consume PCI-E gen3 from the cpu and enable secureBoot in the UEFI, just that; the SFF boards lack the I/O hub, so more PCI-E gen3 lanes are available, the X300 for example its really small and only handle secureBoot and overclocks, the rest is all provided by the CPU on SFFs boards.
     
  8. cryohellinc

    cryohellinc Ancient Guru

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    smear campaign, cheap and dirty.
     
  9. HeavyHemi

    HeavyHemi Guest

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    Please elaborate.
     
  10. SSD_PRO

    SSD_PRO Guest

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    Back the horses up on this one. This can't be real. You need PCIe 3.0 x4 to run modern M.2 drives and they come close to saturating at max loads. Unless they are going to allocate the remaining 4 lanes from the CPU to run M.2 direct, this would be a problem. Limiting the chipset to old PCIe 2.0 would be eyeroll but not un-amd. AMD has always suffered from reduced storage performance. My bet is this is fake. If real, not a deal breaker but very disappointing.

    For anyone wanting to see the Z270 block diagram, here it is: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/ww...ram-16x9.png.rendition.intel.web.1072.603.png

    edit - actually, now looking again, I see the * on the 20 lanes from the CPU. It drops to 18 if SATA is in use? I guess the suggestions is there are 16 lanes for graphics and 4 left for M.2/U.2, as long as you don't use any SATA ports? If you do then you get x2? Uh.... again I smell fake.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2017

  11. Aura89

    Aura89 Ancient Guru

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    ....what?
     
  12. ChicagoDave

    ChicagoDave Guest

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    Sure:

    PCIe 3.0 Lanes - X370 = 0 | Z270 = 24

    PCIe 2.0 Lanes - X370 = 8 | Z270 = included in above

    PCIe Lanes From CPU - Ryzen = 20x3.0 | I7-7700K = 16x3.0

    USB 3.1 Gen 2 - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0

    USB 3.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = 10

    USB 2.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = 14

    SATA 6GBit - X370 = 4 | Z270 = 6

    RAID Configuration - X370 = 0/1/10 | Z270 = 0/1/5/10


    Intel info taken from:
    https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz

    and

    https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz
     
  13. Valken

    Valken Ancient Guru

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    Hmm... Seems Intel would be the best bet for M2 Ultra/mGPU users.

    For single GPU and M2 Ultra, Ryzen looks good but only at X370.

    My MB/CPU would not support CFX or SLI with M2 and that was one reason why I got a regular SATA SSD instead so caveat emptor.
     
  14. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    I see you as one of those people who thinks "moar iz better" without any regard as to whether having more or the newest of something will even slightly have any impact on your experience. Consider these:
    * There are almost no GPUs out there that saturate PCIe 2.0 @ 8x. A GTX 1080 will lose maybe 10FPS at most. PCIe 2.0 @ 16x has pretty much a negligible performance difference compared to PCIe 3.0 @ 16x, so if you need to run an M.2 SSD, your GPU can easily give up some lanes without sacrificing performance for either device.
    * Many motherboards supply 3rd party SATA controllers. If you've got an M.2 drive for performance reasons, then any argument anyone has against 3rd party controllers is irrelevant. Beyond synthetic benchmarks, it doesn't matter anyway.
    * The chart says you have to be using more than 2x SATA ports (that the motherboard chipset comes with) in order to dock PCIe lanes. Except for maybe RAID1, why would you care about needing any more than 1 SATA port? If you've got the money for an M.2 drive that can saturate 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes, you've got the money for a multi-TB SATA drive or two, and you probably wouldn't settle for a peasant optical drive, right?
    * Not sure where you're getting the impression that this is situation isn't "un-amd". AMD has had plenty of extremely competitive chipsets in the past. My motherboard is from 2010 and supports 3 PCIe 2.0 GPUs at 16x,8x,8x, or 2 GPUs at 16x. Remember what I said about GPUs and PCIe 2.0. In addition to that, it has 6x SATA III ports and USB 3.0. Even by today's standards, that's a very capable chipset.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2017
  15. Aura89

    Aura89 Ancient Guru

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    Not exactly correct

    one, if you have an X370 motherboard, you'll have to have a CPU which will increase the USB 3.0 to 10, so effectively, the x370 has 10 USB 3.0 as it is literally impossible to have any configuration be less then 10

    For two, the Z270 has a max number of USB of 14, and you can have a selection of up to 10 3.0 and up to 14 2.0. Now, does this mean you could have 10 3.0 and 4 2.0? i'm not sure, using the 10 3.0 might take up all of the what the chipset has set aside bandwidth wise for all i know, but lets just say at most if you had 10 3.0 you could only have 4 2.0.

    Lets be clear though

    X370 chipset total USB (between 3.1, 3.0 and 2.0) = 18

    Z27- chipset total USB (between 3.1, 3.0 and 2.0) = 14, not 24 which is what your post implies

    Honestly, looking at your "comparison", it's not a useful comparison as it does not include anything that the processors give and you can't run a motherboard without a processor, except you included the PCI-Express aspect of the processors, but didn't include the intel processors that do not provide PCI-Express

    A correct version of x370 comparison would be:

    PCIe 3.0 Lanes - X370 = 10-20 (APU vs Ryzen) | Z270 = 24-40

    PCIe 2.0 Lanes - X370 = 8 | Z270 = 0

    PCIe express lanes max - x370 = 18-28 (APU vs Ryzen) | Z270 = 24-40(i3/i5 vs i7)

    USB 3.1 Gen 2 - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0

    USB 3.0 - X370 = 10 | Z270 = Up to 10

    USB 2.0 - X370 = 6 | Z270 = Up to 14

    Total USB - x370 = 18 | Z270 = 14

    SATA 6GBit - X370 = 4 | Z270 = 6

    SATAe 12GBit - X370 = 2 | Z270 = 0(?)

    RAID Configuration - X370 = 0/1/10 | Z270 = 0/1/5/10
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2017

  16. HeavyHemi

    HeavyHemi Guest

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    Maybe this makes it a bit more clear

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2017
  17. RooiKreef

    RooiKreef Guest

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    Huh? This looks a bit odd thought. How can their top chip not even support PCIe 3.0?? My Z68 from intel even supported this and that is waaay back. I honestly will take this info with a grain of salt.
     
  18. HeavyHemi

    HeavyHemi Guest

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    There's the Chipset, then there is what is from the CPU:

    My bad, I thought I had the other chart in there.

    http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/am...and-b300-a300-compared-only-sli-for-x370.html
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2017
  19. sverek

    sverek Guest

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    X300 looks good enough to me.
     
  20. Aura89

    Aura89 Ancient Guru

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    This only compares the i7, so it's not that useful unless you are specifically looking at an i7, and seeing how a lot of people have i5s in this forums, if they do not notice this is only for i7, they will be mislead

    But either way it does not compare the full range of the Z270 since the Z270 does support i5's and lower

    And it's not clear on the USB ports again either, as it's up to a total of 14 USB ports, all of them can be USB 2.0, but then there would be no 3.0, it's not 10+14
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2017

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