Monday, February 13th 2023

ASUS ROG Strix X670E-I Chipset Sits on a M.2 PCB
AMD's high-end X670E motherboard chipset combines two Promontory 21 chips working together to deliver a single solution. With regularly-sized ATX motherboards, having two chips to form a chipset is fine, as there is much room on the PCB. However, with Mini-ITX motherboards, packing two Promontory 21 chips is difficult as the PCB area is limited. To combat this, ASUS introduced an interesting solution to solve the problem and allowed the company to ship the high-end X670E chipset inside a Mini-ITX form factor. Thanks to UNIKO's Hardware's findings, we look at the exciting solution ASUS used to solve this problem.
Instead of two Promontory 21 chips side by side, one is placed on the motherboard directly, while the other stands vertically attached by M.2 PCIe slot. Below, the chipset's pictures and the highlight show how it looks disassembled.
Source:
UNIKO's Hardware (Twitter)
Instead of two Promontory 21 chips side by side, one is placed on the motherboard directly, while the other stands vertically attached by M.2 PCIe slot. Below, the chipset's pictures and the highlight show how it looks disassembled.
76 Comments on ASUS ROG Strix X670E-I Chipset Sits on a M.2 PCB
And if the second chipset was used to add usb ports (still don’t see where the connection would be routed), it would be pure idiocy not to make them at least usb3 20gbps, seeing how there would be plenty of bandwidth for those.
usb hub is not a small ic, and most of them need extra flash ic and oscillator.
there is no room for that if you see the naked pcb.
and how are the three usb2 ports routed from the second chipset?
Are you suggesting that the only reason they installed the second chipset was to get access to two USB 2.0 ports?
i dont know, it could be.
and there is one only, there are two usb2.0 9-pin on the rog fsp-ii daughter pcb, and one of them is provided by the first pch on the main pcb, another 9-pin is provided by the second pch and there is just one port in that 9-pin, i believe asus calls it usb_aio something like that.
Do you have pictures of the pinout for the second chipsets connector for this board?
I calculated 33 pins per side, pciex4 takes 32 per side. There is no way to get 3 native usb2 ports with just the remaining 2 pins.
i guess you could re-use 12v lines and stuff, but the chipset and connected m.2 drive can use up to 10 amps of 3.3V. That means that there need to ve multiple pins dedicated to the power delivery, and any 12v lines free’d up are needed for the 3.3V delivery.
Standard pcie connector is rated at just 1.25 A per pin. That means that you’d need 8x 3.3V pins, meaning that you’d gain just one pin from the 12v pins -> 3.3v pins change in power delivery.
So three more at minimum need to come somewhere.
.. and it’s still stupid AF. You could just mount the USB hub on this glorified m.2 riser. There is a max power consumption of 64 watts from that stack. 25W per m.2 and 7W per chipset.
Coolable? No.
There must be several PCIe lines that are used specifically and only for the RGB inscription "ROG". haha. So, pay yourself extra to be a "ROG"! /Troll off
For USB 2.0, B650 chipset provides 6 and CPU provides 1, so 7 in total.
There are 3 USB 2.0 at the rear, 3 in the two headers, and one for BT, audio and aura, so the board needs 9.
I struggle to understand that the only reason to include mounted second Promontory21 chipset was to add two missing USB 2.0 ports, and discard everything else that the chipset offers.
The dual-chip E-variant increases the number of PCIe lanes from the chipset (so ignoring the x16 primary PEG slot from the CPU) from 8x Gen5 to 24x Gen5. Honestly, how many M.2 slots can physically fit on an mITX board, and it's not like you can use one of the PCIe slots to add a riser because mITX only has one slot which is already running off the CPU at PCIe Gen5 x16.
It's like they wanted to put X670E in the product name to charge a premium but HOW in the hell could you ever take advantage of the extra lanes with no space on the board left and no slots available to plug in an M.2 SSD riser card!?
On Ryzen in particular, the function of the classic Northbridge chip (IO, memory controller, integrated graphics, expansion slot interconnects etc) is almost exactly the same subset of functions exclusively handled by the Ryzen I/O die on the CPU package. As it's a separate physical chip, that really is a "Northbridge", or at least it wouldn't be if that wasn't an Intel-specific name for the damn thing! :)
I could be wrong, but even those mITX boards I've seen that hide a couple of M.2 slot behind the motherboard only have room for three M.2 slots in total, which doesn't necessitate the additional lanes of an X670E
Other ancillary stuff like USB4 port(s) and even dual 10GbE NICs are all far lower bandwidth than even Gen3 lanes, so clearly not in the discussion unless I'm grossly misunderstanding gen/lane alloaction/bifurcation on the current-gen AMD chipsets.
X670E is dual chip with PCIe x16 5.0
X670 is dual chip with PCIe x16 4.0
B650E is single chip with PCIe x16 5.0
B650 is single chip with PCIe x16 4.0
mITX simply doesn't have enough real estate to hook enough slots up to the extra lanes of any dual-chip solution.