Friday, June 14th 2019

ASMedia-sourced AMD B550, A520 Chipset Motherboards Arrive in 2020
If a recent MSRP price-list leak is anything to go by, motherboards based on the AMD X570 chipset will cost a pretty penny, beating even Intel's premium Z390 Express chipset on average motherboard pricing. Those looking for an affordable motherboard for the Ryzen 3000 series processors have the option of choosing existing AMD 400-series chipset based motherboards, and taking advantage of the USB BIOS Flashback feature that's almost universally available on the AMD platform. You lose out on PCI-Express gen 4.0 with the older platforms, which may not be a big compromise when it comes to graphics cards, but would limit your M.2 NVMe SSD performance upgrade path. One possible option would be to wait for affordable variants of AMD's 500-series chipsets, which are sourced from ASMedia.
According to DigiTimes, ASMedia will tape out its next-generation AMD-platform chipset silicon, and is on track to shipping its new chipsets to motherboard manufacturers by Q4-2019. This would pin availability of the first motherboards based on these chipsets to at least Q1 2020. These chipsets not only feature PCI-Express gen 4.0 downstream lanes, but also boards based on these will be built to AMD's PCB requirements for the new platform, enabling a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot for discrete graphics, and revised CPU VRM and memory wiring specifications that improve overclocking over the previous generation platform. For now there are two SKUs in the works, the B550, which succeeds the B450, and the A520, succeeding the A320.Image Credit: Hardware.info
Source:
DigiTimes
According to DigiTimes, ASMedia will tape out its next-generation AMD-platform chipset silicon, and is on track to shipping its new chipsets to motherboard manufacturers by Q4-2019. This would pin availability of the first motherboards based on these chipsets to at least Q1 2020. These chipsets not only feature PCI-Express gen 4.0 downstream lanes, but also boards based on these will be built to AMD's PCB requirements for the new platform, enabling a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot for discrete graphics, and revised CPU VRM and memory wiring specifications that improve overclocking over the previous generation platform. For now there are two SKUs in the works, the B550, which succeeds the B450, and the A520, succeeding the A320.Image Credit: Hardware.info
83 Comments on ASMedia-sourced AMD B550, A520 Chipset Motherboards Arrive in 2020
The real bottleneck that nvme is hitting is IOPs, and PCI-E 4.0 SSD is not inherently faster than PCI-E 3.0 SSDs in IOPs, especially important is the low queue depth IOPs.
PC work loads rarely invlove huge sequential transfers but lots of rather small files.
You act like PCI-E 4 will benefit all of those PCI-E 3 SSD that you mentioned, it doesn't.
My point is PCI-E 4 is not something that budget user should be looking at, and even today it is still true.
The lower end NVME SSDs still do not offer significant low queue depth IOPs performance over the better SATA SSDs.
As for M.2 AHCI that is just SATA signal and offers no performance benefit what so ever over 2.5 inch SSDs.
The only benefit for M.2 AHCI drives is no extra cables to deal with and saves space.
This thread is about supposely B550 and A520 chipsets, most of these mother boards will be sub-100 Euro, so for budget users every little bit of saving counts.
The A320 chipset is only used in super low-end boards or OEM boards that cost like $40 USD. A520 is the supposed replacement.
But do also note that there are often also 2.5 inch SSDs that goes on discount for basically nothing.
I guess I will have to throw that model again.
ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB SSD PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 NVMe 3350/2350 MB/s costs 84 Euro's without any discount and such.
Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250GB M.2 PCIE MZ-V7S250BW costs 82 Euro's.
Sure I see some that cost 160, 200-500 Euro's, but those are depending on capacity, such as 1TB for 160-200, and 2TB for 500, same Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB M.2 PCIE MZ-V7S2T0BW, it's a 2TB drive, that's the only difference why it is expensive ~500 Euro's.
But this is affordable as hell (the 80's Euro ones). 250 for OS and 512 for gaming, and 3GB read write, doesn't matter if sequential. Not sure what else you need than speed and capacity.
Of course the other difference being the fact that you need new mobo for M.2. slots, otherwise you gotta survive with SATA, but if you plan a new PC build, then surely the M.2. is something to consider having on a mobo, since it makes no difference in costs and is future proof as well, especially in age of quick technology development.
Also by the nature of cheaper TLC SSDs is they tend to lose speed as they fill up, so in the end you really are not getting much of a difference in performance.
On a budget more capacity is better than theoretical performance. In the best case senario for nvme SSD you save a few seconds on load times.
On budget you can get yourself HDD, but it performs worse than SSD, lets get real if we're talking about practicality vs theoretical on a budget. Despite being on budget you still want to get the best.
But I will stop arguing about this, because clearly you are just as stubborn as myself. I believe there is no real argument to why keep using SATA for core parts, or not enough arguments to prove it.