Thursday, January 19th 2023
ASRock Returns to its Roots with Wacky X670 Upgrade Card
For those that don't remember the early days of ASRock, the company started out making some rather unusual motherboards, often with some wild and wacky upgrade paths, such as both a slot and a socket for a CPU or both AGP and PCIe graphics card slots. Since then, ASRock has become a much more mainstream motherboard maker, but the company appears to have gone back to its roots with what the company calls the X670 Xpansion Kit. Right now, the expansion card appears to be working with the B650 LiveMixer motherboard and it's unknown if it's compatible with other models from ASRock. It seems to be limited to ASRock motherboards only, due to the fact that the add-in card requires not only a x4 PCIe slot with all lanes attached, on the motherboard, but also a custom cable that is most likely for "low-speed" I/O's such as I2C, SPI and so on.
As the name suggests, the X670 Xpansion Kit allows B650 motherboards to be turned into X670 motherboards, more or less. The card is home to a second chipset, which enables not only two additional M.2 slots for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, but it also features two SATA ports, a 10 Gbps USB-C port, three USB-A ports and—maybe most interestingly—a 10 Gbps Ethernet interface. It's unclear if this will be a retail product, but the card provided to Level1Techs doesn't appear to be an engineer unit, but a full retail ready product. It's definitely an interesting upgrade path for those that have invested in a B650 motherboard and there's no real reason why this shouldn't work as well as having the second chipset on the motherboard, especially as ASRock appears to have fitted a signal re-driver on the add-in card to make sure the PCIe signals are handled properly.
Sources:
Level1Techs, via VideoCardz
As the name suggests, the X670 Xpansion Kit allows B650 motherboards to be turned into X670 motherboards, more or less. The card is home to a second chipset, which enables not only two additional M.2 slots for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, but it also features two SATA ports, a 10 Gbps USB-C port, three USB-A ports and—maybe most interestingly—a 10 Gbps Ethernet interface. It's unclear if this will be a retail product, but the card provided to Level1Techs doesn't appear to be an engineer unit, but a full retail ready product. It's definitely an interesting upgrade path for those that have invested in a B650 motherboard and there's no real reason why this shouldn't work as well as having the second chipset on the motherboard, especially as ASRock appears to have fitted a signal re-driver on the add-in card to make sure the PCIe signals are handled properly.
72 Comments on ASRock Returns to its Roots with Wacky X670 Upgrade Card
Also, nice cpu, the K6-III was very rare.While I wish this was true, the average person simply doesn't need that many ports, and if you are a power user who needs several 10G ports, go get a threadripper.
All of what you said is fine if you dont care about $$$.
I like the product, lets people buy into new AMD chipset at lower pricepoint, then upgrade connectivity later without ripping out board, far from pointless, kind of like starting with less ram in 2 dimms then upgrading later.
This card bears further investigation and followage.
Dear thewan, maybe learn how computers work kthnx.
Still, very cool idea! So cool, I'm wondering it that card works with a less ugly motherboard. I might just buy one of these and a compatible motherboard to support the idea and innovation. I don't care if it costs more than an comparable X670 board. We need more of this sort of innovation!
AMD AM5 is crazy expensive - and when we disregard MB manufacturers greed, lack of competition, useless flashy thingies, still we have high complexity of the boards that indeed drives prices up.
So, we could have basic board with one M2 port, one PCIe port for graphics, two SATA ports for cheap... than with add-on card you get another set of ports, etc, etc... Instead we have expensive B650 and completely useless A620 and no-man land between.
We only have problem with ATX being so obsolete that it is painful to watch...
If you haven't noticed, all of the Thunderbolt add-in cards require something similar as well and although no board maker, nor Intel has shared exactly what interfaces are used, SPI, I2C, LPC, etc. are said to be possible options, as they're commonly used for this type of signalling.
But yes, UEFI support is obviously also required.
how do you plea:
the thunderbolt 3 spec is open and has been publicly avaiable since 2017
the 'thunderbolt certification' is whats closed also usb4 pretty much cross covers both
this is stupid this entire product is assinine because you don't just add a south bridge over pci-e and magicly add more connections to the cpu
which is what you need for this to matter
Their DDR2+DDR3 boards and the boards with both AGP and PCI-e back in the day were neat.
Edit: Or this board with both S478 and LGA775 lol
www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/P4%20Combo/index.asp
Even HEDT-segment ones. 101% agree with this. Its brilliant idea.
Can you imagine (sadly now dead-end) TRX40 boards with two x8 cards like those? Extra 8 M.2s, 2 10Gb NICs, stacks of USB, 8 SATA ports.
The CPU makers shut that down mostly as things moved more into the CPU, but they had some cool stuff
I just... i just want this as an x4 expansion card for everyone. That'd be sick.
we stopped doing this 30 years ago because daughterboards are stupid
btw you can get all of this on a pci-e card no need for a seperate chipset
just slap a Usb4 Controler on a card add a 10g ethernet nic from realtek And a Pci-e PLX to drive the nvme bays
there is litterally zero need to have a seperate chipset on .... whatever this abomination is
Maybe learn how things work before making daft comments?Not all chipsets support proper bifurcation, so...PLX chips cost more than AMD/ASMedia's chipset. Plus this incorporates native support for more interfaces whereas the PLX chips are just PCIe bridges/splitters.
Realtek doesn't make 10 Gbps PHY's as yet.I guess you'll never get an X670 board either then?