New details have emerged regarding AMD’s X370 chipset. This will be AMD’s enthusiast chipset for the AM4 platform and will support the upcoming Summit Ridge processors. These processors are of course based on the new Zen architecture and offer a 40% IPC increase over Excavator and much higher efficiency.
The X370 will officially replace AMD’s longstanding 990FX enthusiast chipset. This chipset will offers users the max PCI-Express lanes out of all the new chipsets from AMD, it is the only chipset that will support multi-GPU functionality. You will have support for both SLI and CrossFireX with two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots. AIBs will be able to add more PCI-Express lanes through a PLX chip if they want.
The X370 will offer full overclocking support for enthusiasts. It will have a very sophisticated GUI that will allow you to overclock and properly tune your system. All AM4 CPUs will have unlocked multipliers expect to see some pretty hefty overclocks and LN2 setups!
24 PCIe lanes?!!!!! The 790FX, 890FX & 990FX all featured 42 lanes so I was hoping the new X370 would have the same. NOPE, ONLY 24! This will make it very hard for me to go with the new Summit Ridge platform. As an AMD fanboy, I want to leave Intel and get back to an only AMD system (currently using the Sunrise Point Platform). However, PCIe lanes are becoming ever more important especially with the NVMe (Samsung 950 Pro/960 Pro) protocol I’m using. I want to see the core logic expanded out to 80 lanes, not go backwards to 24! Would love to speak to Jim Keller about this! This is very disappointing to me, and sure, a PLX chip expands them, but they add latency to the system.
I may pass on AMD (can’t believe as a shareholder and fanboy I just said that) and wait for Skylake Extreme with the new chipset/socket replacing the Wellsburg/Halo platform.
Oh and this article wasn’t very “detailed”.