ASUS is giving prospective Ryzen 3000 owners a great reason not to upgrade to an expensive X570 board. AMD’s Robert Hallock had claimed that PCIe 4.0 would not be supported on lesser chipsets, but ASUS will be proving him wrong with BIOS updates that bring the speedy bus standard to various X470 and B450 motherboards.
This is possible because the processors have their own chipset. While PCIe 4.0 isn’t ubiquitous on non-X570 boards, the CPU’s IO chip can still offer 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes for graphics cards and 4 more lanes for M.2 NVMe SSDs.
Yes, that’s two ‘chipset’ chips. The one in the proc, thus is PCIe 4.0 and if you use X470 or another series 400 chipset, the interlinks are PCIe Gen 2.0. But that does mean that the CPU IO chip still can offer PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes to selected slots (graphics cards (x16) and one M2 slot (x4).