If you’re a high-speed storage addict who’s planning a jump over to AMD’s mid-tiered B550 chipset, GIGABYTE may have the ideal solution for you. Benchlife.info has shared a look at the company’s new B550 AORUS MASTER motherboard, which is pretty unique in that it has not one, not two, but three PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD slots.
This is notable because the B550 chipset only offers 20x usable PCIe 4.0 lanes with a third-gen Ryzen processor. That has left room for just two M.2 slots on the majority of B550 motherboards revealed thus far, but GIGABYTE has presumably split the PEG on its AORUS MASTER to enable three M.2 slots.
“The way we see it, the topmost M.2 slot has a direct PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection from the AM4 socket (as it normally should),” wrote TechPowerUp. “The second- and third slots, however, pull their wiring from a series of lane switches that split the main x16 PEG slot to gen 4.0 x8/x4/x4. It’s possible that one of the two x16 (electrical x4) slots has a further lane sharing arrangement with one of the two M.2 slots.”
The only other B550 motherboard that appears to be equipped with three M.2 slots is ASRock’s B550 Taichi. These products are expected to hit shelves next month.