Some B660 motherboards will not support PCI-E 5.0

Although the motherboards with the B660 chipset have not yet arrived on the market, it seems that they are already in the manufacturing process as a user received their Asus Z690 motherboard with the label of a B660 motherboard instead of their model, and said The label revealed information on what to expect from the new B660 motherboards.

The motherboard to which this label corresponds is the PRIME B660-PLUS D4, which, as its name mentions, will have support for DDR4 memory instead of DDR5. Apparently on its label, it will not support PCI-E 5.0 like the Z690 motherboards, but will only offer support for PCI-E 4.0, lowering manufacturing costs since you have to be much more careful with the PCI-E signal 5.0.

Realistically, GPUs still don’t even take advantage of the bandwidth of PCI-E 4.0, and besides the fact that there are no PCI-E 5.0 SSDs on the market yet, when they come in their prices are going to be incredibly high since even SSDs PCI-E 4.0 are practically impossible to buy, so whoever chooses a B660 motherboard for its low cost may not choose to buy a PCI-E 5.0 SSD but a cheaper option. Thus, it does not make much sense to implement all the hardware changes required to support PCI-E 5.0 if they are going to end up increasing the costs of a motherboard that should be cheap for a technology that is not going to take advantage of.

In this way, users will be able to upgrade to Alder Lake cheaply by purchasing a B660 motherboard, a processor like the Core i5-12400F that offers the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X for $ 100 less, and keeping their current DDR4 memories, since at the moment DDR5 does not offer additional performance, and thus obtain a platform with a great price-performance ratio.

It is not yet known if this decision applies to all B660 motherboards or only to some models of some manufacturers, so we will have to wait for their launch to know the specifications of the different models and to know this information. It is expected that H610, B660 and H670 motherboards hit the market between late January and early February, alongside Alder Lake “No-K” processors such as the i9-12900, i7-12700, i5-12400, i3- 12100, and other models, so we have to wait a few more months to find out. We will keep you posted on the news, so stay tuned to HD Tecnología.

What do you think about this decision to remove support for PCI-E 5.0 on B660 motherboards? Is it correct if it implies a reduction in price?

Source: Videocardz