With the announcement of the AMD B550 chipset, many manufacturers are preparing their own motherboards. And the latest entry is the GIGABYTE B550 AORUS, which comes with the added bonus of no less than 3 slots for SSD M.2 PCIe 4.0.
GIGABYTE B550 AORUS will have three M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD slots
The report points out the possibility that the three M.2 slots on this motherboard have PCI Express Gen 4.0 connectivity, which normally should not be possible as all PCIe rails on the B550 are Gen 3.0 for this purpose. As we can see, the upper M.2 slot has a direct PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection from the AM4 socket (as it should normally be). However, the second and third slots get their wiring from a set of rail switches that divide the PEG x16 main slot into the 4.0 x8/x4/x4 Gen. One of the two x16 slots may have a different arrangement for sharing the rail with one of the two M.2 slots.
If a “Matisse” or “Vermeer” processor is used, the main PEG slot runs at full x16 bandwidth until one of the two lower M.2 slots is occupied, whereupon the x8/x4/x4 configuration is activated. However, when coupled to a “Renoir” APU, it is likely that the two lower M.2 slots will be completely disabled, as the APU has only 8 lanes to the PEG, which are the first 8 (permanent) lanes of the PEG slot.
The 8-Lane PCIe Gen 3.0 budget of the B550 chipset is spent to drive the various drivers on the board (except the HD audio driver connected to the CPU) and in one of the x16 slots. It is expected that GIGABYTE will release the B550 AORUS master in mid-June 2020.
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