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
I care more about 1x lanes at 5.0 than i do a 16x that has enough bandwidth already, so we can use those little slots with 2.5/5/10Gb cards and devices, a 4x slot for a 40Gb USB-C or whatever
Beyond that, the board would need to have a full x4 PCIe 4.0 slot and that weird connector for it to work.
Motherboard vendors have a high degree of freedom here.The external chipset might be seen as PCIe device by Windows, but I am interested to see how this could work. It's certainly a good solution for those who need more connectivity
That said, I don't understand why this has a more complex connector that the Thunderbolt cards, but it's possible that ASRock has to use multiple "slow" standards.
I agree that this seems overly complex and if the chipset was only used for PCIe, it would most likely end up being simpler than this, as it shouldn't require to sync with so many other subsystems.
Technically it ends up being a four to eight PCIe 4.0 bridge/switch, plus four PCIe 3.0 lanes if it was used as a "universal" PCIe expansion solution.
need more nvme storage? plug in a board for it with several connectors. newer cpu? just swap the board every thing els stays the same
extra ram. add in ram expension card XD
"The sky is the limit"
I'd definitely buy this if this works with an X570; just to add a little more capability to my existing board, and if AsRock is innovative enough, also allowed to be forward carried when the time does come to upgrade.
Now I have to ask; can two or more of them work on the same motherboard? Seems like a novel way of being able to create a mini network-all-in-one if you can have multiple 10GbE + extra NVMe + Extra USB + SATA ports.
We're all looking at it thikning "oooh shiny expansion card!" anyway
The video does explicitly state that you need that "J2" cable or it wont work, but we all certainly want a version without that cable requirement
that riser gives you BIOS control of it, but they could also surely implement one that had software control and a USB header, for example