PCI Express 5.0 Announced With 32GT/s Transfer Rates

[ms178]

What's the (real) issue with high power usage on PCH and using active cooling solution? To me it sounds like "mimimi"

It is a reliability issue, and not everyone is comfortable replacing a fan on their motherboard in four years of time (or throw away a still decent board). As I still use an X58 board, that had a pretty hot PCH, too. But my Asus P6T Deluxe V2 managed to integrate a copper heat fan design which went up to the finned VRM heatsink. In all fairness to AMD, if NVMe-RAID is the only condition where active cooling is needed, that would lessen my harsh critique quite a bit. That scenario would be very narrow and I won't expect normal users to be impacted that much as NVMe raid is not a common use case for normal consumers.

[andrei_me]

Isn't there any aftermarket fan for PCH or water cooler block for it? Like the ones we buy for CPU etc

[Melcar]

Regarding the X570 chipset:
- There have been chipsets in the past that have used much more power.
- The fan is only needed to provided additional cooling under certain circumstances.
- I see the inclusion of active cooling as a motherboard vendor thing than a fault of AMD. There is no reason why a properly designed cooling setup (heatsinks with proper fins and heatpipes) would not be able to keep this chip cool. Instead of all the plastic shrouds and lights, vendors should have focused on proper cooling. It's not like these boards are going to be cheap (people are already speculating $300-400).

[ms178]

Is that a design flaw, or just a consequence of saturating two PCIe 4.0 x4 buses over a sustained period (which I understand is the condition which draws more power/requires cooling)?

Honest question.

It could be a bit of both. From what I have heard so far, NVMe-RAID is pushing the I/O quite heavily and maybe that draws too much power or produces to much heat in the specific function block on that IC? As we haven't seen many other PCIe 4.0 implementations, that could be restricted to AMD's specific implementation of that particular feature. At least I haven't heard of the same trouble with IBM's PCIe 4.0 implementation.

This article here is enlightening still for my point above, that PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 are pushing this technology to its limits: https://www.eetasia.com/news/article...t-at-what-cost

[Luke_Wolf]

If if it's going to come with the same major downsides as X570 I really don't care about what it's bringing.

I am already considering to buy a X470 motherboard for the Ryzen third generation (zen2) processors instead of x570 because I don't like the higher power consumption and even if I might let this pass considering the performance improvements, for sure I cannot let it pass the fact that the chipset requires an active cooler.
I really don't want any noise coming from the motherboard itself.
And besides the noise I don't want to worry about what happens when the fan get's stuck by some loose wire, insect, dust or when it will eventually die.
I was just getting to be happing that we're eliminating one more moving part from the computer slowly replacing the HDDs with SSDs and now another moving part comes directly on the motherboard.
And there's one thing when a non vital component dies and a whole lot different when the most important component dies (the motherboard).
I plan to keep my new motherboard for around 10 years like I did with the other ones, but with a moving part I bet that is impossible.
I see the X50 as:
More power hungry
More noisy (because of the fan)
More failure prone (because of the fan)

The last two are NO-GO for me, so I made up my mind I would buy an x470 motherboard instead.

If you're that worried about it get the Gigabyte X570-Aorus-XTREME as it's just a heatsink there.

[Bsdisbetter]

When I first saw that term years ago, I thought it was giga-Tesla per second.

We don't even have that many PCIe 4.0 devices on the market, and 5.0 is already announced?

What, so stop development until 100% uptake?
Or do you mean we can't get excited about 5 when we have few examples of 4? The Ryzen 3000 had the ability to use 4:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigabyte-amd-ryzen-3000-pcie-4.0-x470,39377.html

[polarathene]

I see the X50 as:
More power hungry
More noisy (because of the fan)
More failure prone (because of the fan)

The last two are NO-GO for me, so I made up my mind I would buy an x470 motherboard instead.

Power draw is going to be based on load no? Just run your devices as PCIe 3.0, if the x470 is capable of supporting PCIE 4.0 bandwidth(I thought that's a hardware thing rather than just bios update), then chances are it'll have some limitations or run into similar problems under same load(although the new motherboards may have more lanes?)

Noise is only going to be due to high load that requires the active cooling, just like many quality PSU can control the RPM or not spin based on temperature. I remember when GPUs would get really noisy for me generations ago, but now something that consumes as much or more power and considerably more powerful barely makes any noise(or far less in comparison even when under full load).

Just wait and see what boards come out and reviews, your concerns are likely to be valid on all of them.

[polarathene]

We don't even have that many PCIe 4.0 devices on the market, and 5.0 is already announced?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#History_and_revisions

PCIe 3.0 was announced back in 2007, spec finalized 2010.
PCIe 4.0 was announced back in 2011, spec finalized 2017.
PCIe 5.0 was announced back in 2017, spec just finalized end of May 2019.

Usually a year or more before a product was made available after finalizing the spec. There's a PCIe 4.0 NVMe product that came out mid 2018. So maybe, if AMD/Intel decide to support 5.0 in future, we might see something in 2020 or so if lucky?

[ThoreauHD]

The difference in pcie 3 to 4 at the chipset is 5 watts to 11 watts, which needs cooling when doing nvme raid. So for a lower power setup, just don't do a 15GB/s raid array, and it won't care. The only gpu atm to tip toe past pcie 3 x16 is the 2080ti.

And there are chipset heat piped motherboards being releases, rather than fan based if it's a acoustic issue.

Either way, the pcie 5 spec does open a convenient door for AM5 in 2021. X570 is the end of the line for AM4. I suspect pcie 4 overall will be a short lived revision. That will give them a chance to rework this chipset heat generation issue.

[Danny3]

If you're that worried about it get the Gigabyte X570-Aorus-XTREME as it's just a heatsink there.

I assume you're talking about this one:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard...REME-rev-10#kf
I had no idea that one of the vendors succeeded to make a X570 with just a heatsink instead of the fan.
So it's possible to cool the chipset with a large enough heatsink, exactly how I thought.
I think the others took the fan way because they don't need to consume so much metal and it's cheaper for them to just put a fan, even though the motherboards are expensive.
I was planning to buy Asrock X470 Taichi Ultimate
https://asrock.com/MB/AMD/X470%20Tai...mate/index.asp
Looking at the BIOS update list I see "Update AMD AGESA to 0.0.7.2" which is the support for the third generation Ryzen (zen2) from what I heard.
It also has support for Windows 7, which I want for a dual-boot setup and a PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port which I heart that is still superior to USB for mourse/keyboard.
The two motherboards seem to have more or less the same features and I will see in the end what I will choose.
Thank you very much for your great suggestion!