The Ultimate AMD AM5 Motherboard Guide

PCIe 5.0

That’s right, it’s time to step up to PCIe 5.0 for AMD, which promises to deliver 24 lanes from the CPU socket on AM5. AMD are eager to point out that this is “the most available on any platform in the industry.” or to put it a clearer way, more than Intel offers. With PCIe 5.0, you’ll be getting faster-than-ever bandwidth, allowing next-generation graphics cards, storage devices and more to deliver even greater performance. AMD claim that storage devices using PCIe 5.0 components could see read speeds increase by 60% or more over PCIe Gen 4.0 devices, which were no slouch to begin with.

Faster Storage

Currently, PCIe Gen 4 drives can deliver read speeds of up to 7400 Mbps and read speeds of up to 7000 Mbps, give or take. If PCIe Gen 5 can really deliver up to 60% more performance thanks to the increased bandwidth, we could see read speeds of almost 13000 Mbps read and 12000 Mbps write, which is more than 20x the speeds you get from a 2.5″ SATA III SSD. The few drives we’ve seen on the horizon leave the old NVMe 1.4 standard behind for a new version 2.0 controller too.

Chipsets

Keep in mind, however, that various chipsets will offer different levels of PCIe 5.0 integration. B650 and B650E motherboards will only have PCIe 5.0 storage on the M.2 slot. X670 will have PCIe 5.0 on the NVMe slot also, but the graphics slot is optional, this may even be swapped around, with it just on the GPU slot, and not on the NVMe slot, although I suspect more the former than the latter will be the norm. Then there’s the X670 Extreme, which can have PCIe 5.0 on two graphics slots and one NVMe slot. Again though, I suspect some models will offer some tweaks to that configuration too, but gamers will no doubt want to invest in at least X670 for the GPU performance if they’re wanting to future-proof for next-gen graphics cards too.

USB SuperSpeed and Type-C

stronger I/O support is part of the new AMD Socket AM5, which adds up to 14 SuperSpeed USB ports, including Type-C support across the board. Of course, how many ports will vary from one motherboard to another, but the point is, a shift toward more high-speed ports is the main goal for the next generation.