Storage Interfaces

Storage Performance

The Gigabyte X670 AORUS Elite AX has a few more high-speed USB ports than its B650 counterpart, thanks in part to the X670 chipset. While the B650 has less of everything, depending on the motherboard configuration, it may actually have more external USB ports. If you don't necessarily need all these USB ports and M.2 sockets, the AMD B650 chipset is a good alternative (cheaper too). Included in this motherboard is four USB 2.0 ports which are excellent for headphones, USB Audio DACs, web cameras, game controllers, keyboards and mice. Those who need extra bandwidth will find four 10 Gbps USB Type-A ports, four more USB Type-A ports rated for 5 Gbps and a single USB-C 20 Gbps to round it out.

*ORICO USB4 NVMe Enclosure (ORICO-M208C3-U4) used for USB bandwidth tests.

AIDA64 (SATA 6 Gb/s)

AIDA64 (USB 3.2)

The external USB-C enclosure is rated for 40 Gb/s over USB4 or Thunderbolt 3/4. The fallback is 10 Gb/s for everything else, the 923 MB/s tested speed is about 100 MB/s under what would be considered top marks for 10 Gb/s.

AIDA64 (NVMe M.2)

After installing four M.2 Gen 4 x4 drives at once and performing the maximum bandwidth test on each individually, we can see from the charts that all sockets are at least Gen 4 x4 compliant. M.2 Socket One and Two are directly connected to the CPU, bypassing the chipset. Socket 1 also supports Gen 5 x4, but without access to a Gen 5 NVMe, that specific M.2 socket bandwidth limits cannot be fully tested.