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[JohnnyFootball]

AMD Nixes PCIe 4.0 Support on Older Socket AM4 Motherboards, Here's Why

AMD officially nixes support for PCIe 4.0 on older motherboards.

www.tomshardware.com

Users today may find a PCIe 4.0 option available in their pre-X570 motherboards. However, users should expect this option to be disabled when final retail BIOSes are released to implement full performance and stability for new 3rd Gen Ryzen processors.

As pre-X570 motherboards were not designed with PCIe 4.0 in mind, their designs may be incapable of running PCIe 4.0 signaling with the requisite stability and performance. To ensure a reliable and consistent experience in the field, PCIe 4.0 will not be an option ultimately available to pre-X570 motherboards. Users may continue with a beta BIOS if they desire, but performance and stability cannot be guaranteed.

This is slightly disappointing to those who wanted to keep their B350, X370, B450 and X470 motherboards. Especially those who wanted to take advantage of the awesome 4.0 NVME SSD speeds, but it makes sense from a stability standpoint and AMD decided that it was just better to disable the feature entirely rather than allow it to run unreliably on chipsets that weren't designed to take advantage of PCI-Express 4.0 bandwidth.

However, if you do have one the pre-X570 motherboards and have downloaded beta-BIOS that enables PCI-4.0 you can continue to use it at your own risk.

Reality is that this is not a huge feature being lost and I am willing to bet that most who are going all in on a Ryzen 3000 system were probably planning on purchasing an X570 anyway.

Having said that, it is still pretty bad on AMDs and motherboard makers part to even give hope that this could happen.

 

[Shifty]

Making enthusiast tweakers run a beta BIOS seems like a dumb choice when they could simply hide it behind an "ADVANCED SETTINGS USE AT YOUR OWN RISK" menu, given that it means you're version-locked out of any future improvements.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

Making enthusiast tweakers run a beta BIOS seems like a dumb choice when they could simply hide it behind an "ADVANCED SETTINGS USE AT YOUR OWN RISK" menu, given that it means you're version-locked out of any future improvements.

Or AMD is covering their ass, which is always going to be the smarter choice.