Saturday, May 21st 2022
Factory Drawing of ASUS X670 Prime-P WiFi Appears Online
We're expecting to see a wide range of AM5 motherboards next week during Computex, but we're already being treated to some early leaks ahead of the show. The most recent leak was picked up by @9550pro on Twitter, but was originally posted on Baidu. What we're looking at here though, isn't actually a picture of a motherboard, but rather the placement map for the SMD components used during motherboard assembly. These pictures are often used to make sure things like the solder mask and components were applied properly during production. However, it does give us a good look at the overall layout of the ASUS X670 Prime-P WiFi and the fact that the X670 chipset does indeed consist of two parts. What is also clear is that we're looking at a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot here, as these slots are SMD components rather than through hole.
Other things that are clearly visible, includes support for three M.2 slots, of which the one closest to the CPU might be PCIe 5.0, but there's really no way of telling by just looking at the connector placement. There's also a space for a WiFi module at the bottom of the rear I/O, but beyond that, it's hard to make out the proper port layout. However, there appears to be at least one USB-C port at the rear, as well as a header for another one at the front of the motherboard, next to a USB 3.0 header. The board also appears to feature 14 power phases and obviously four DDR5 DIMM slots. The chip between the two chipsets are either a Super I/O chip or possibly a PCIe redriver. In addition to the x16 PCIe 5.0 slot, the X670 Prime-P appears to be getting a single PCIe x1 slot and two PCIe x4 slots, both which appear to get physical x16 slots. Finally the board should have two SATA ports mounted at a 90-degree angle, as well as four ports at the bottom edge of the PCB. ASUS seems to have gone for a solar system pattern on the PCB itself, so it'll be interesting to see what the actual boards will look like.
Sources:
@9550pro, via VideoCardz
Other things that are clearly visible, includes support for three M.2 slots, of which the one closest to the CPU might be PCIe 5.0, but there's really no way of telling by just looking at the connector placement. There's also a space for a WiFi module at the bottom of the rear I/O, but beyond that, it's hard to make out the proper port layout. However, there appears to be at least one USB-C port at the rear, as well as a header for another one at the front of the motherboard, next to a USB 3.0 header. The board also appears to feature 14 power phases and obviously four DDR5 DIMM slots. The chip between the two chipsets are either a Super I/O chip or possibly a PCIe redriver. In addition to the x16 PCIe 5.0 slot, the X670 Prime-P appears to be getting a single PCIe x1 slot and two PCIe x4 slots, both which appear to get physical x16 slots. Finally the board should have two SATA ports mounted at a 90-degree angle, as well as four ports at the bottom edge of the PCB. ASUS seems to have gone for a solar system pattern on the PCB itself, so it'll be interesting to see what the actual boards will look like.
51 Comments on Factory Drawing of ASUS X670 Prime-P WiFi Appears Online
I was hoping the move to pcie 5.0 would mean better IO but for now it will continue to be just a marketing bullet point - hopefully at least the freaking x4 slots and m.2 are not shared, that would just add insult to injury
One positive is that with 2 chipsets they'll not be able to dump everything in the same IOMMU group, they'll need at least 2 :D
On the Intel side, this is the comparable product. www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-Z690-P/AMD has at least added four lanes of PCIe 5.0 for an SSD, something Intel totally missed out on.No, sorry, I haven't heard anything about that. We should know in a few hours I hope, but it's possible AMD won't spill the details at their keynote, but I should be able to find out a bit more on Tuesday if nothing else.
www.techpowerup.com/295068/asrock-am5-motherboard-and-more-leaked-ahead-of-computex
The x16 slot and one M.2 slot are directly connected to the CPU and those two are the ones with PCIe 5.0 support and the only things I have had confirmed are PCIe 5.0 at this point in time.
Some random little bits about a couple of potential MSI boards.
There's a niche use for multiple GPUs in the HEDT Prosumer lineup and AMD have Threadripper Pro for that. Let's face it, if you can afford the minimum cost of entry (a pair of 3090 cards) then the CPU and platform costs are basically negligible anyway....
x16 slot and nvme being on 5.0 is great and all, but I'm more curious on how AMD will handle the chipset link with the 2 chipsets, x4 or x2 to each one? Or x8 to the master and then x4 from master to slave?SLI is far from the only reason to want more expansion, even before going HEDT. There's capture cards, gpu passthrough, sound cards, usb expansion, ethernet nics, etc. that users may want to connect. And Threadripper Pro is a BIG jump in everything, especially price, that would be more of an argument when regular Threadripper was being updated, but it seems that it's a dead platform for now.
I was hoping the move to PCIe 5.0 and dividing the chipset, or whatever their idea with the 2 chips is, there was going to be more IO which (with the very limited info we have now) doesn't seem to be the case. Even though Asus Prime is the lower end of the Asus lineup, this is still the X chipset version, not B or A budget ones.
Looks dubious because the main slot will be direct from CPU, so what Are those chipsets fed by and capable of.
Remembering, the CPU will have a chipset too.
Plus surface mount pciex slots wouldn't necessarily show on the picture.
Through-hole or SMT, it's more a reflection of the prebuilt maker's ability to properly pack the product for shipping
I need lanes and am stuck on ThreadRipper 2nd gen until the situation improves, but I’d really like the IPC and refresh schedule of a desktop platform.
Expect to see a lot more mixed PCIe revision supported in the future on all kinds of platforms.
- Capture cards may have a physical x16 interface (many of them are only x4 physical) but they don't need bandwidth at all. They hardware-encode to low-bandwidth streams.
- GPU passthrough is far beyond the scope of consumer platforms. Yes, in beta since Sept2021 you can now pass through Geforce cards instead of Quadro/A-series cards to VMs but we're touching on enterprise/rackmount solutions already, probably going beyond even the scope of Threadripper Pro HEDT platforms. Outside of academic curiosity, why would you want GPU passthrough on a desktop platform?
- Sound cards are not limited by a PCIe 1.0 x1 interface. They need low latency and almost zero bandwidth.
- USB expansion is valid, but the Zen4 CPU itself is the limitation of the platform. They've quadrupled the bandwidth over Zen3 (so 8x Gen5 instead of 4x Gen4) but that's still only a total of 256Gbit/s for the entire chipset-CPU interconnect. That's only enough for 6x Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbit/s) USB ports and assumes that you disable everything else (so SATA, NVMe, NIC, Audio, USB2, all other motherboard slots except the x16 PEG slot - which is a comically unrealistic option). Realistically, if a board provides more than two TB4 ports the chipset is going to be crippled for bandwidth without disabling important things like M.2 slots and other USB 3.2 ports. Once again, we're into Threadripper Pro or EPYC territory if you need that much USB bandwidth for whatever niche use it is that requires so many TB4 ports.
This will come down to manufacturers in how they implement it on each individual board model. With 8x Gen5 lanes coming from the CPU, it's likely that most vendors will spend up to half of that budget to offer up to four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots for NVMe storage. The rest will go on internal or rear IO and integrated peripherals. On X570 boards you only get one PCIe slot at Gen4 from the chipset because there aren't enough lanes spare on Zen2/Zen3, meaning that the best X570 boards can only run two M.2 slots at PCIe 4.0 x4 unless the BIOS supports dropping the PEG x16 slot down to x8 to free up lanes. This is such a niche use case that only the MEG unify supports that (off the top of my head).The change in Zen4's chipset bandwidth will likely just make the existing 2 or 3 M.2 slots faster, rather than crippling most of the chipset M.2 slots to PCIe 3.0 x2 speeds like many current implementations do.
There's still people on x570 having USB dropout issues, I can only imagine the mess 2 separate chipsets could be. Also sharing those 4x lanes for all those USB and other peripherals between the 2 chipsets ooff I don't think that's such a great plan.
On the upside those extra x4 lanes for a USB 4.0 controller look really nice, maybe will see some boards with 2 m.2's connected to the cpu. Let's see what board manufacturers can come up with
- 1 more M.2 2>3,
- 2 more SATA 4>6,
- double up all kind of USB ports in part of Chipset,
- Chipset requires more TDP 7>14watts compare to B650
X670E has requirement to support PCI-Express version 5 on both PCIE #1 and NVME #1. But X670 might not?