They need to do this for all boards... i love the idea to buy a budget board and then down the line when you need to have more IO or more storage you can just buy a chipset upgrade card for your motherboard.. and not have to buy a brand new motherboard..! I would love something like this!
well, technically that was what all those empty PCIe slots were for that don't exist on AM5 boards anymore. Need more USB? buy USB card. Need more SATA? buy SATA card. Need Sound, LAN -> there is a PCIE card for that! AM5 boards entered the chat: "i heard you like M.2 SSDs, so i replaced everything with M.2 ports !!! woooohooo" ...hey where did that SPDIF port for my Surround Sound System go? "i said M.2 Ports! i don't care get a Soundcard!" ...there are only 2 PCIe ports, so i have only one left after the Soundcard is in there "i said M.2 PORTS!!!!" ...but i don't need M.2, i already got like 4 S-ATA SSDs ...and those are big and cheap and i could easily expand storage that way if there were more S-ATA ports instead of M.2 .... i guess now i have to buy more expensive M.2 if i run out of space again "told ya! M.2 EVERYWHERE!!! WHOOOOHHOOO" ... ... yeah i'm not really happy with the layout of 80% of the AM5 boards right now, and sure as heck not with their pricing.
@@ZeroB4NG ? Who makes a cheap pcie5 board with ddr5 support ? Intel doesn't amd doesn't almost like pcie5 controllers are expensive. Even fast sata controllers 10gbps 15$ 20gbs 25$ 40gbps 100$ and pcie lanes make that look slow
Motherboard seems like an all around great product but the chipset expansion card is just brilliant! Would love to see more useful expansion cards like this one. Very cool, thanks for sharing! shout out to the editor who is doing great work.
If AMD could write CPU agnostic drivers for either general CXL or PCIe connectivity for their chipsets to be used in this way, that would open up a whole new market, especially on the AsRock Rack side! You gotta nudge AMD and AsRock to keep up the experiments till they get enough Product-Market fit to make it economical, because they're definitely on to something.
yeah it would be awesome if they removed the need for special communication lines and just put all in a UEFI payload, then you could just pop in a bunch of those cards in
That probably is a eSPI or a LPC bus... the FCH is basicallya glorified PLX with different MAC+PHYs for different interfaces. EDIT: I'm 99% sure that the additional connector is a LPC bus, the pinout is the same of TPM moduel sthat are directly connected to the LPC bus.
You're thinking way too small. Look at the Intel NUC compute element. Imagine putting that into any system that supports it and needs that additional grunt. Chipsets on a PCIe link is only scratching the surface of what ASRock can do here.
@@tuttocrafting This actually makes no sense, since the ryzen series came out all cpu's were said to support 8x/8x Pci-express slots. The fact the NONE of them dois false adversiment By AMD. Why do I need PLX to have 8x/8x on pci-express on AM5 ? When it supposivly supported by X370 on up but all the boards that do have it have to have the PLX chip to split lanes ?
I actually like this!! In the old days ASRock did some weird stuff like this. Boards with Intel and AMD CPU support. Boards with AGP and PCIe. Boards with DDR2 and DDR3! (or was it DDR and DDR2?). This is great.
@@user-wq9mw2xz3j For those conscious about E-Waste and if the expansion card is just about half the price of a full figured X670 chipset motherboard then this is tempting.
there were board that could be fitted with amd xp cpu or a athlon 754 and then the board you could buy addons so you could fit a genration next cpu on that addon card 754->939 so basicilly you could from a 1800 single core cpu to a dual core 4600? cpu but that was asrock then when they were inventive
That Epyc workstation idea is actually ridiculous and I love it and I wish there was a way i could stick one of these in my x670e motherboard just to say that i have 3 chipsets.
I suppose in theory having more chipsets is possible as both chipsets on x670(E) are the same chip unless there is some built in limit that prevents it. Though in daisy chain you funnel all downstream chipsets and their attached devices through the pci5x4 link of the first one to the cpu. Though when pcie6 is finalized they could just design it so the incomming side could do 5 or 6. This would allow the first to talk to two sub-chips over 5 or one over 6. Or create a few different possible chipset that could be mixed and matched with rules on what mins are needed for the various levels.
That is really awesome. It's one of those things that seems like it's such a good idea that you wonder why no one's thought of it before. As an aside, on top the awesome functionality, that motherboard looks amazing too.
they did think about it. They just called it Thunderbolt and made it not only proprietary originally, but also used a protocol that made it incompatible with everyday, existing USB peripherals so they could sell their own or license to OEMs
It is not possible if you have only one chipset. B650 is quite recent. It works here because AM5 chipsets can daisy chain and you can use a fast PCI-E slot to give it bandwidth.
Wow! that motherboard has a cool paint scheme! Normally I go for the more subdued colors, but this is just done right 👍 And then the PCI-e peripheral?! heck yeah, I want this thing. I'm even happy to pay a premium for it.
@@meddlin I don't think so, I'd rather pay for the add-in card extra like you said, but I wouldn't buy it just because of the weird colours. It would give me eye cancer - but then again I'm the type of person that thinks only trashy people like graffiti which this reminds me of. I'm happy to be the possible niche-niche snob that is the 0.1% of the 0.1% niche of the home server market.
That may be the board that gets me onto AM5, would like NIIIICE in my white In Win 303! Not to mention that I/O on that board is AMAZING, that's a nice piece. ASRock delivering again - especially with the wild ideas too!
I would love for motherboards and CPUs to be built around this idea in general. Put more PCIe lanes to generic use, and then the whole system becomes more modular. And with fewer SKUs for the motherboard manufacturers to keep track of while trying to cater to every possible niche of the market.
I feel like AIBs would really like this if they were allowed go wild with the chipset features, but also it allowed motherboard manufacturers to cut back on motherboard costs. Mind you this kind of unbundling might lead to the cost of motherboard features being higher in the long run then they would be if they needed to be bundled together in one package, but it would allow for a lot more options to get the exact feature set you want without features you don't necessarily want.
I cannot overstate how fantastic this would be, it's the function of multiple PCIe cards in one! In an age of very few PCIe slots -and- lanes on consumer motherboards, the expansion offered by this is unparalleled! I would buy this in a heartbeat.
"they didn't stop to think if they should" is most often used to describe something terrible, but sometimes by a turn of chance something completely amazing turns out. I absolutely love this! It's a pity the livemixer is not a particularly great motherboard (realtek lan, older codec, no x16 slot bifurcation - though we at least get a x4 slot direct from the cpu besides the one from the chipset), but the solution deserves a lot of praise.
Sonnet already make one of these, without the need for a special connector. It's called the McFiver PCIE add-in card. It gives you 2 USB-C 10Gbps ports, 10Gbps ethernet and 2 NVME cards on an x8 PCIE card.
I would totally get a chipset pcie card. I've been racking my brain over getting b650 or an x670 because I want to do a drop in upgrade eventually, and knowing that I could change my mind at a later date, even if that route would be more expensive than just getting the x670 in the first place. The flexibility would be very nice
Good lord man, this is *so close* to exactly what I wanted. I want to run a NAS out of this expansion kit and do virtualization on it, so I can have network storage speeds at PCI-E to my main computer and make it easy to maintain this device as a network device.
This reminds me a lot of the Athlon64 days, crazy chipset combos and what not. Peak craziness was the Sun Java Workstation, it was based on the first gen Opteron and had a modular motherboard. You could add a board for a 2nd CPU or swap out half of the motherboard to upgrade from AGP to PCIe.
Honestly this is incredibly exciting. The sole reason I want to upgrade chipset from an X570 board is to get more M.2 expansion so if I could buy a B650 board now and upgrade down the line when I get more storage, I totally would do that. And bonus USB devices too? Fantastic!
@@annebokma4637 If you can buy things now, why wouldn't they be there in the future...? If you think you need more, plan for it. Expansion cards aren't new things....
id love to see a fully modular mobo, where you pic the socket you want, and then a daughter board with whatever chipset you want, maybe even audio and peripheral i/o modules.
I want one. It can be used for multi system testing. Dedicated ports for your test equipment. Lets say you need to test a NVME drive, you can just use the card for easier swapping instead of the motherboard slots. Plus many more ways this can be used. Standing by for this.
This is awesome. I'd love something like that. Or like you touched on in the motherboard overview, offing more older generation PCIe lanes available instead of all PCIe 5.0 or 4.0
I was googling for this add-in card … then you said it’s a special edition for just you Wendell ….. my heart sank 💔💗😔! I’d buy this in a heartbeat 💓 🥰😱😳if it was on the market to buy!!!
100% this needs to be standard across the industry. I'd love to be able to buy a b650 board today and upgrade it down the road to x670 or some future chipset as my needs grow. I think this could lead to a reduction in ewaste as well. like your board, but need new chipset features? get a swap in replacement and save the board from the landfill
If my Asrock Riptide board supported this I would buy one! In the past few months my view of Asrock has drastically improved after seeing all the cool products and features they offer!
What a weird and awesome device to have available. A stupid powerful usb chipset expansion card that also happens to do a ton more than just usb expansion. It doesn't look super ugly too, a massive bonus.
This is great and would help with the boards being so expensive, you can just buy this add-on if you need the features of it but the people that don't need it won't have to do so.
I wouldn't buy something like that along side a motherboard, but I would love to have something like that as an option for upgrading further down the line. With my current system I regret not getting a higher end motherboard for extra connectivity that I didn't expect I would want at the time I bought it. Having that sort of card as an option could have been a perfect solution to the mistake I made.
Honestly, the card kind of sounds like a good idea. It includes many different features of other standalone cards that you can already go out and buy, but also upgrades your motherboard's chipset
aaah You got the LiveMixer! I love mine. Clever mobo, yes. I do have a Firewire card in PCIe slot 2, I need that for my audio converter (audio studio). oh I see.. "special edition". 🙂
Carrier pigeon can fly up to 90+mph while carrying up to 1.5oz. With a 2TB M.2 drive strapped to it's leg a carrier pigeon has an effective bandwidth of 6.3Gbps over a distance of 1 mile. Not quite enough for full PCIe speeds but the distance is impressive compared to the limitations of copper wire.
Yes I would do that. On a X16 would be awesome. This is needed! We have been stuck with no real workstation cpus that were in a realistic price point for too long!
Would like to see this on every ASRock AM5 board. I mean, if they're not going to give us more PCIe slots on the board, this is a pretty nice alternative.
Yes! The amount of PCIe lanes are far too limiting on right now. When looking at the server and workstation chips with lots more PCIe the problem is I tend to forgo the higher clocks of the consumer platforms which is annoying!
Honestly I think this is a great idea. I'd love to be able to buy a board knowing that down the road I can semi-upgrade the board just by dropping a card in. I think the catch would be supporting the cards past the time of that motherboard's generation and how to keep prices reasonable 3-5 years down the road.
This is great! I would love if board manufacturers would revive the old PC philosophy of "expansion cards" where the board only provides basic functionality (and is thus kept cheap!), while expansion slots allow for upgrade-ability on need. The current trend is unfortunately quite the opposite: Boards suffer featuritis while PCI-E slots get stripped down. E.g. many AM5 boards offer countless M.2 slots (what for??) (and ridiculously over-sized VRMs) where PCI-E slots should be. I mean, those few people who really need more than two M.2 could use a PCI-E card providing those. But then you could use the PCI slots also for other stuff... Oh, and: GFX cards bigger than two slot wide should just not exist, eating up all the PCI slot space... 🙄
Yeah @franklehman3785 you (and a few others) pretty much hit the nail on the head. Although some gamers with lots of money might want 2 wasted blank slots to fit their ridiculously massive 3-slot RTX 4090, I in particular don't want wasted slots, I want more classic slots with a variety of cards available. If I have to buy a certain ASRock mobo to get that, so be it. What I don't want is a $500+ mobo that doesn't even have a 10 gigabit Ethernet on it. With Apple's latest announcement, I can get a $599 M2 Mac Mini and pay only an extra $100 for 10 gigabit Ethernet. Why would I buy a $500 mobo plus a $300(+) AMD CPU plus memory plus SSD plus PSU plus fans plus something to stick it in, when I can get a cheap 10 gigabit Ethernet Mac Mini that sips the juice? On the other hand I prefer an AMD CPU cuz it gets equivalent CPU horsepower for half the Apple price. So I'm all in with ASRock's philosophy here.
Very cool. There aren't really a lot of options in cards these days. Since GPUs take up 2-4 slots and audio is usually good enough on the mb, it's really down to the 4x m.2 cards OR an sfp nic. This seems like a great idea. My GB TRX40 has the thunderbolt card, but honestly I don't get that much out of thunderbolt it in Linux.
Kudos to Asrock, Wendell and AMD. That would be a great way to expand your motherboard. Especially, if not needed you can remove it and use the PCIE expansion slot for sth else. Great, that header should be added to every Asrock board as „special sauce“; the Asrock RACK MB would be an excellent basis for that too, especially with those more, seperate and faster LAN is always appreciated (plus more drives hehe).
That's a pretty cool concept and would like to see more of that, gives you the option of getting more than just a 10GB ethernet for your card slot. Also allows you to buy a cheaper board now with an upgrade path later. Seriously, what happened to upgrade paths anyways.... lets stop replacing and start upgrading!
This would be amazing for a virtualization standpoint, if there was not a limit on how many you can use (apart from lanes), imagine a threadripper proxmox rig with 8 of these or so
It's pretty interesting for housing all hardware for a single passthrough VM, I wonder if they could make it in a way that you can install more than one so you can have like 2 or three of those, one for each VM (which at the moment isn't possible since there is only one special connector for data stuff)
@@farmeunit more compact. To passthrough a network + some USB + disks you need a lot of cards (and slots) and this limits you to only have one or two, or go virtual for everything apart from GPU
@@marcogenovesi8570 So then you still need more slots, lol. One card with two NICs and a card with 5 USB and two USB-C, takes up the same a two of these. You can actually get 4-port NICs if you want. No need to passthrough disks. Have a separate datastore or use a NAS.
@@farmeunit How is 3 cards less slots than a single card. Yes you can get the special 100$ quad controller usb 3.0 and a quad gigabit card and then passthrough a single USB controller to each VM, then do sr-iov for the gigabit card to have network, and then passthrough specific disks. But it's a lot more work than just passthough a single IOMMU group and all you need is in it. I know you can use a datastore and virtualize everything that is not the GPU, I would just like to have a "blade" experience to this where for each VM I get a single card to run all IO
I think it's utility depends entirely on how many PCIe slots the upstream motherboards have - if they don't sacrifice motherboard slots through not having the second chipset on board then it would be great, if however there's x670 options that already have the extra slots and IO built in then it just seems unnecessarily complex since it has to go in a specific slot rather than being able to be used as a general purpose PCIe mux
It sounds very interesting. A lot of it does depend on how much it costs for them to do this and how much they have to charge to turn a profit. People will pay a lot for cards adding m.2 slots or for 10GbE or to add IO to their computer so a single card that does all that seems like a win assuming the price is reasonable. One thing I would really want though is if this could be used in other systems as well. I would understand if some functionality wouldn't work but things like the additional IO it adds should be made to work regardless of the platform.
I would be into this if it didn't specifically require motherboard support. I already have an X670E motherboard and would love to add 10gb ethernet, but have a hard time giving up one of the so few PCIe slot we get on consumer boards for just ethernet. A more general expansion card like this would make me much happier to give up that slot. Also still wild to me that at this point a $500 motherboard can come without 10gb ethernet, but it checked all the other boxes so I went with it.
It's a nice technology perspective, however I think it will eventually come down to the price. The price should not exceed that of a general X670(E) motherboard, otherwise you just could buy that board instead of the B650 with that add-on card.
Genius move, I hope it will be product someday. Buy a "cheap", but good enough motherboard then add TB and/or second chipset for extra connectivity if needed.
Wow, I'm just imagining this coming out next generation with pcie gen5 and thunderbolt. It would have enough bandwidth to do everything it's doing now and add in thunderbolt without bottlenecking.
I'd buy that Seems like a great way to reduce costs too, but even if it was the same price or slightly more, I'd still get it so I can stagger my upgrades.
I like it. It gives more USB, merceda port, I can put another NVMe drive, and 10 gig network. That sounds pretty nice. Especially if I would be able to put it in an x670. Just for the extra ports
This is how it used to be done. I remember getting extra hdd controllers, sound card, TV card, and wifi card. It might end up that way again with PCIe getting faster and faster. Eventually there's gotta be a point where having all those other devices on nearby traces crammed in together will end up causing problems or so many layers it'll be more expensive to integrate into the mainboard. So we would have both a GPU card and an IO card with a user selected chipset connected to a 16x PCIe 6.0 slot. Since it looks like CAMM could move DRAM sockets directly to the CPU package there'll be more CPU socket pins available for the CPU to run more PCIe.
@@erkinalp I don't see why that matters? Ever see the size of a naked Pentium 2? There's no reason a BGA or LGA CPU package actually needs to be small if CAMM also serves to eliminate area used for SODIMM slots, or even integrated DRAM on the motherboard. CAMM sticks don't even need to be the large ones we see today thanks to higher density DDR5 DRAM as well. Even mobile devices could still integrate this since currently the CPU PCB is already on top of the mainboard PCB. There would merely be more overlapping area for the CAMM pins. Place the CAMM socket on the bottom of the CPU package and it can even place the DRAM PCB on the same vertical plane as the motherboard, reducing thickness of the device more than possible today but still maintaining the ability to upgrade DRAM.
Holy shit, its like a modern equivalent of a super i/o card from the early IBM days. Never thought I'd see a combined card like that in my lifetime, not new at least.
Oh yeah, workstation. Those products rarely have the same level of outside connectivity compared to mainstream products. This chipset add-on should be pretty good for them.
I’d love a card like this, if it was usable by any board that’s at least on the AMD platform. Being stuck to say only one model kind of ruins me wanting it.
Is there a particular reason chipset expansion cards haven’t been more of a thing? Impractically expensive? Low yield? Licensing complications? Unidentified demand?
I would like to see an upper half in a lower half ATX motherboard. Have the upper half house the CPU RAM, x16 pcie slot, some rear IO, audio connection, and maybe m.2. The lower half would house the chipset, audio circuitry, and any IO expansion.
Perhaps Asrock can test the waters by putting this terrific version of the board and the epic expansion card up for a draw. I wouldn’t mind winning one. 😆
I really see potential in the small expansion cards. Pay a little more for the B650+ mainboard and have the option to update it to an X670 at any time. Mainly because the bottom slot is hardly used by normal users, but it could be problematic in the future.. because of graphics cards.
How to make a server into a workstation? USB audio interface and GPU. Done, if you want to keep it in the server rack. If you want it next to your desk, add water-cooling
Yes we would like it, but with an option with or without 10Gbit LAN, for me 2.5G would suffice. But I would also like a breakout with 4x USB 2.0 ports (which the chipset should have) on an extra slot. Even a cheapo ALC897 on the same breakout should be an option, to have the possibility to make a virtual machine without compromises (2 people one maschine for example). If they would do that for all boards, they could save motherboard cost to provide only the "basic" functions and include the card for all E variants. Would save time on the assembly line, would reduce stock keeping and if you need more of the E boards, just add the card and put a sticker on the box.
This is cool. Could you fit one card per VM? Now put a small GPU and soundcard in there with a displayport output to have GPU accelerated Desktop and it would be the perfect desktop virtualization card.
For some reason, this reminds me of upgrading L2 Cache, by populating or re-populating sockets on the mobo. I don't know why, it's pretty different, but comments are good, so, this is what you're getting 😆
Imagine having most of the backplane IO on a single expansion card that you can choose. That will reduce e-waste and enable much easier upgrades. But that is not what designed-obsoletence is all about.
I had the same idea, as AMD is using PCIe to connect the chipsets (well DMI at Intel is very PCIe-ish, but has some few magic packets). The problem here lays in the proprietary extra harness, which is also why the TB-EX expansions (from ASUS) are so vendor-and-model-locked, even that there are just few signals. Hope one day this closed approach will be gone.
Yes please this would be amazing for up front cost savings to be able to get what you need later. especially if they came in different configuration for like an oops all sas, or m.2 gone wild, or even 4 5 10Gb ethernet with a 6th 100Gb to run as a an amazing router firewall combo. Also Another awesome option use this setup break out all the extra pcie stuff that a mini itx system could handle with this card and a riser cable.
Expand MB abilities as needed. Migrate your chipset from one generation to the next. Reduce e-waste, reduce unnecessary duplication of components. Back in the before times it was common to have ISA cards for IO, they would commonly be moved from computer to computer keeping the core motherboard costs low while allowing you all the ide and sound and comm ports or whatnot you wanted. I want a new open standards modular interface to populate the ITX backplate.
It's a great upgrade path for someone who does not want to drop all the cash up front for an X670 or who wants a particular brand that does not make that model, like how NZXT only makes B650E. Actually, the PCB for the N7 is built by ASRock so I wonder if this card would just work in the NZXT board?
They need to do this for all boards... i love the idea to buy a budget board and then down the line when you need to have more IO or more storage you can just buy a chipset upgrade card for your motherboard.. and not have to buy a brand new motherboard..! I would love something like this!
well, technically that was what all those empty PCIe slots were for that don't exist on AM5 boards anymore.
Need more USB? buy USB card.
Need more SATA? buy SATA card.
Need Sound, LAN -> there is a PCIE card for that!
AM5 boards entered the chat: "i heard you like M.2 SSDs, so i replaced everything with M.2 ports !!! woooohooo"
...hey where did that SPDIF port for my Surround Sound System go? "i said M.2 Ports! i don't care get a Soundcard!"
...there are only 2 PCIe ports, so i have only one left after the Soundcard is in there "i said M.2 PORTS!!!!"
...but i don't need M.2, i already got like 4 S-ATA SSDs ...and those are big and cheap and i could easily expand storage that way if there were more S-ATA ports instead of M.2 .... i guess now i have to buy more expensive M.2 if i run out of space again "told ya! M.2 EVERYWHERE!!! WHOOOOHHOOO" ...
...
yeah i'm not really happy with the layout of 80% of the AM5 boards right now, and sure as heck not with their pricing.
Had the same thought as soon as I saw it. Those IOMMU groups were as they "should be" too.
What's next dedicated extension cards for video and audio? ;-)
@@ZeroB4NG ? Who makes a cheap pcie5 board with ddr5 support ? Intel doesn't amd doesn't almost like pcie5 controllers are expensive. Even fast sata controllers 10gbps 15$ 20gbs 25$ 40gbps 100$ and pcie lanes make that look slow
This concept especially for the mITX mobos which would benefit the most as they need to do modular as much as possible
Manufacturers HATE him!
With this simple trick
Motherboard seems like an all around great product but the chipset expansion card is just brilliant! Would love to see more useful expansion cards like this one. Very cool, thanks for sharing!
shout out to the editor who is doing great work.
If AMD could write CPU agnostic drivers for either general CXL or PCIe connectivity for their chipsets to be used in this way, that would open up a whole new market, especially on the AsRock Rack side! You gotta nudge AMD and AsRock to keep up the experiments till they get enough Product-Market fit to make it economical, because they're definitely on to something.
yeah it would be awesome if they removed the need for special communication lines and just put all in a UEFI payload, then you could just pop in a bunch of those cards in
That probably is a eSPI or a LPC bus... the FCH is basicallya glorified PLX with different MAC+PHYs for different interfaces.
EDIT: I'm 99% sure that the additional connector is a LPC bus, the pinout is the same of TPM moduel sthat are directly connected to the LPC bus.
AMD outsources its drivers to China.
You're thinking way too small. Look at the Intel NUC compute element. Imagine putting that into any system that supports it and needs that additional grunt. Chipsets on a PCIe link is only scratching the surface of what ASRock can do here.
@@tuttocrafting This actually makes no sense, since the ryzen series came out all cpu's were said to support 8x/8x Pci-express slots. The fact the NONE of them dois false adversiment By AMD. Why do I need PLX to have 8x/8x on pci-express on AM5 ? When it supposivly supported by X370 on up but all the boards that do have it have to have the PLX chip to split lanes ?
I actually like this!! In the old days ASRock did some weird stuff like this. Boards with Intel and AMD CPU support. Boards with AGP and PCIe. Boards with DDR2 and DDR3! (or was it DDR and DDR2?). This is great.
in the end itts cool, but pretty stupid and useless for the mass. wont selse because it doesnt make sense to buy.
@@user-wq9mw2xz3j For those conscious about E-Waste and if the expansion card is just about half the price of a full figured X670 chipset motherboard then this is tempting.
there were board that could be fitted with amd xp cpu or a athlon 754 and then the board you could buy addons so you could fit a genration next cpu on that addon card 754->939 so basicilly you could from a 1800 single core cpu to a dual core 4600? cpu but that was asrock then when they were inventive
a dual core 4600+ would run windows 10 i guess 20 years later
DDR2/3 Boards existed.
I own an ASRock P43Twins1600, has 2*DDR3 and 4*DDR2 slots. But you cannot use them together.
That Epyc workstation idea is actually ridiculous and I love it and I wish there was a way i could stick one of these in my x670e motherboard just to say that i have 3 chipsets.
I suppose in theory having more chipsets is possible as both chipsets on x670(E) are the same chip unless there is some built in limit that prevents it. Though in daisy chain you funnel all downstream chipsets and their attached devices through the pci5x4 link of the first one to the cpu. Though when pcie6 is finalized they could just design it so the incomming side could do 5 or 6. This would allow the first to talk to two sub-chips over 5 or one over 6. Or create a few different possible chipset that could be mixed and matched with rules on what mins are needed for the various levels.
That is really awesome. It's one of those things that seems like it's such a good idea that you wonder why no one's thought of it before.
As an aside, on top the awesome functionality, that motherboard looks amazing too.
they did think about it. They just called it Thunderbolt and made it not only proprietary originally, but also used a protocol that made it incompatible with everyday, existing USB peripherals so they could sell their own or license to OEMs
It is not possible if you have only one chipset. B650 is quite recent. It works here because AM5 chipsets can daisy chain and you can use a fast PCI-E slot to give it bandwidth.
Wow! that motherboard has a cool paint scheme! Normally I go for the more subdued colors, but this is just done right 👍
And then the PCI-e peripheral?! heck yeah, I want this thing. I'm even happy to pay a premium for it.
It looks like a trainstation's toilet's walls.
@@RUclipsGlobalAdminstrator there's a motherboard scheme for everyone
@@meddlin I don't think so, I'd rather pay for the add-in card extra like you said, but I wouldn't buy it just because of the weird colours. It would give me eye cancer - but then again I'm the type of person that thinks only trashy people like graffiti which this reminds me of. I'm happy to be the possible niche-niche snob that is the 0.1% of the 0.1% niche of the home server market.
I bought it 2 weeks ago its a great board .Looks cool also
That may be the board that gets me onto AM5, would like NIIIICE in my white In Win 303! Not to mention that I/O on that board is AMAZING, that's a nice piece. ASRock delivering again - especially with the wild ideas too!
I would love for motherboards and CPUs to be built around this idea in general.
Put more PCIe lanes to generic use, and then the whole system becomes more modular. And with fewer SKUs for the motherboard manufacturers to keep track of while trying to cater to every possible niche of the market.
Adds a lot of additional points of failure though, both electrically and physically.
I feel like AIBs would really like this if they were allowed go wild with the chipset features, but also it allowed motherboard manufacturers to cut back on motherboard costs.
Mind you this kind of unbundling might lead to the cost of motherboard features being higher in the long run then they would be if they needed to be bundled together in one package, but it would allow for a lot more options to get the exact feature set you want without features you don't necessarily want.
I cannot overstate how fantastic this would be, it's the function of multiple PCIe cards in one! In an age of very few PCIe slots -and- lanes on consumer motherboards, the expansion offered by this is unparalleled! I would buy this in a heartbeat.
"they didn't stop to think if they should" is most often used to describe something terrible, but sometimes by a turn of chance something completely amazing turns out.
I absolutely love this! It's a pity the livemixer is not a particularly great motherboard (realtek lan, older codec, no x16 slot bifurcation - though we at least get a x4 slot direct from the cpu besides the one from the chipset), but the solution deserves a lot of praise.
Sonnet already make one of these, without the need for a special connector. It's called the McFiver PCIE add-in card. It gives you 2 USB-C 10Gbps ports, 10Gbps ethernet and 2 NVME cards on an x8 PCIE card.
They have a lot of weird yet pretty awesome cards available. Prices are all over the place but they seem reasonable for what you get.
I would totally get a chipset pcie card. I've been racking my brain over getting b650 or an x670 because I want to do a drop in upgrade eventually, and knowing that I could change my mind at a later date, even if that route would be more expensive than just getting the x670 in the first place. The flexibility would be very nice
Two NVMe slots plus 2 SATA, a few USB ports and a backup Ethernet on a single slot? Oh hell yeah!
Good lord man, this is *so close* to exactly what I wanted. I want to run a NAS out of this expansion kit and do virtualization on it, so I can have network storage speeds at PCI-E to my main computer and make it easy to maintain this device as a network device.
This reminds me a lot of the Athlon64 days, crazy chipset combos and what not. Peak craziness was the Sun Java Workstation, it was based on the first gen Opteron and had a modular motherboard. You could add a board for a 2nd CPU or swap out half of the motherboard to upgrade from AGP to PCIe.
I really like that approach , that sure seems like proper use of PCI lanes for some reason
Honestly this is incredibly exciting. The sole reason I want to upgrade chipset from an X570 board is to get more M.2 expansion so if I could buy a B650 board now and upgrade down the line when I get more storage, I totally would do that. And bonus USB devices too? Fantastic!
Problem is can you find the card for sale at the time you are ready for more m2?
@@annebokma4637 This is the big question 😆😆
You can buy those things now....
@@farmeunit why would you not buy a x650 now. A future upgrade path isn't meant to be taken now
@@annebokma4637 If you can buy things now, why wouldn't they be there in the future...? If you think you need more, plan for it. Expansion cards aren't new things....
That thumbnail is gold, perfect fit for the giggly excitement. Thank you for reviewing, would be nice if it were a more universal option.
id love to see a fully modular mobo, where you pic the socket you want, and then a daughter board with whatever chipset you want, maybe even audio and peripheral i/o modules.
Looking good Wendel! Keep it up!
Almost looking like Motherboards coming full circle, going back to the AT times with controllers in the add-on boards.
This would be wonderful for budget build upgrades over time. Would love to see this everywhere
The idea is very cool, being able to expand a board for content creators and creatives in terms of storage, it's a great thing
I want one. It can be used for multi system testing. Dedicated ports for your test equipment. Lets say you need to test a NVME drive, you can just use the card for easier swapping instead of the motherboard slots. Plus many more ways this can be used. Standing by for this.
This is awesome. I'd love something like that. Or like you touched on in the motherboard overview, offing more older generation PCIe lanes available instead of all PCIe 5.0 or 4.0
I was googling for this add-in card … then you said it’s a special edition for just you Wendell ….. my heart sank 💔💗😔! I’d buy this in a heartbeat 💓 🥰😱😳if it was on the market to buy!!!
100% this needs to be standard across the industry. I'd love to be able to buy a b650 board today and upgrade it down the road to x670 or some future chipset as my needs grow. I think this could lead to a reduction in ewaste as well. like your board, but need new chipset features? get a swap in replacement and save the board from the landfill
QNAP already produces a similar card, the only thing it lacks is the USB ports, I have a QM2 card with 2x m.2 3.0 x4 + 10Gbe.
I think this is awesome. The live mixer series is actually having me consider AsRock for my next mobo when I upgrade
If my Asrock Riptide board supported this I would buy one!
In the past few months my view of Asrock has drastically improved after seeing all the cool products and features they offer!
What a weird and awesome device to have available. A stupid powerful usb chipset expansion card that also happens to do a ton more than just usb expansion. It doesn't look super ugly too, a massive bonus.
This is great and would help with the boards being so expensive, you can just buy this add-on if you need the features of it but the people that don't need it won't have to do so.
I wouldn't buy something like that along side a motherboard, but I would love to have something like that as an option for upgrading further down the line. With my current system I regret not getting a higher end motherboard for extra connectivity that I didn't expect I would want at the time I bought it. Having that sort of card as an option could have been a perfect solution to the mistake I made.
Honestly, the card kind of sounds like a good idea. It includes many different features of other standalone cards that you can already go out and buy, but also upgrades your motherboard's chipset
aaah You got the LiveMixer! I love mine. Clever mobo, yes.
I do have a Firewire card in PCIe slot 2, I need that for my audio converter (audio studio).
oh I see.. "special edition". 🙂
Carrier pigeon can fly up to 90+mph while carrying up to 1.5oz. With a 2TB M.2 drive strapped to it's leg a carrier pigeon has an effective bandwidth of 6.3Gbps over a distance of 1 mile. Not quite enough for full PCIe speeds but the distance is impressive compared to the limitations of copper wire.
Very interesting idea! Glad it comes with a 10gig port since that is usually a must-buy upgrade anyways.
Yes I would do that. On a X16 would be awesome. This is needed! We have been stuck with no real workstation cpus that were in a realistic price point for too long!
Would like to see this on every ASRock AM5 board. I mean, if they're not going to give us more PCIe slots on the board, this is a pretty nice alternative.
Yes! The amount of PCIe lanes are far too limiting on right now. When looking at the server and workstation chips with lots more PCIe the problem is I tend to forgo the higher clocks of the consumer platforms which is annoying!
Honestly I think this is a great idea. I'd love to be able to buy a board knowing that down the road I can semi-upgrade the board just by dropping a card in. I think the catch would be supporting the cards past the time of that motherboard's generation and how to keep prices reasonable 3-5 years down the road.
This is great! I would love if board manufacturers would revive the old PC philosophy of "expansion cards" where the board only provides basic functionality (and is thus kept cheap!), while expansion slots allow for upgrade-ability on need.
The current trend is unfortunately quite the opposite: Boards suffer featuritis while PCI-E slots get stripped down.
E.g. many AM5 boards offer countless M.2 slots (what for??) (and ridiculously over-sized VRMs) where PCI-E slots should be. I mean, those few people who really need more than two M.2 could use a PCI-E card providing those. But then you could use the PCI slots also for other stuff...
Oh, and: GFX cards bigger than two slot wide should just not exist, eating up all the PCI slot space... 🙄
Yeah @franklehman3785 you (and a few others) pretty much hit the nail on the head. Although some gamers with lots of money might want 2 wasted blank slots to fit their ridiculously massive 3-slot RTX 4090, I in particular don't want wasted slots, I want more classic slots with a variety of cards available. If I have to buy a certain ASRock mobo to get that, so be it. What I don't want is a $500+ mobo that doesn't even have a 10 gigabit Ethernet on it. With Apple's latest announcement, I can get a $599 M2 Mac Mini and pay only an extra $100 for 10 gigabit Ethernet. Why would I buy a $500 mobo plus a $300(+) AMD CPU plus memory plus SSD plus PSU plus fans plus something to stick it in, when I can get a cheap 10 gigabit Ethernet Mac Mini that sips the juice? On the other hand I prefer an AMD CPU cuz it gets equivalent CPU horsepower for half the Apple price. So I'm all in with ASRock's philosophy here.
It's a great idea, I don't need it personally at the moment but sure am glad it exists.
Very cool. There aren't really a lot of options in cards these days. Since GPUs take up 2-4 slots and audio is usually good enough on the mb, it's really down to the 4x m.2 cards OR an sfp nic. This seems like a great idea.
My GB TRX40 has the thunderbolt card, but honestly I don't get that much out of thunderbolt it in Linux.
Kudos to Asrock, Wendell and AMD. That would be a great way to expand your motherboard. Especially, if not needed you can remove it and use the PCIE expansion slot for sth else. Great, that header should be added to every Asrock board as „special sauce“; the Asrock RACK MB would be an excellent basis for that too, especially with those more, seperate and faster LAN is always appreciated (plus more drives hehe).
That's a pretty cool concept and would like to see more of that, gives you the option of getting more than just a 10GB ethernet for your card slot. Also allows you to buy a cheaper board now with an upgrade path later. Seriously, what happened to upgrade paths anyways.... lets stop replacing and start upgrading!
This would be amazing for a virtualization standpoint, if there was not a limit on how many you can use (apart from lanes), imagine a threadripper proxmox rig with 8 of these or so
It's pretty interesting for housing all hardware for a single passthrough VM, I wonder if they could make it in a way that you can install more than one so you can have like 2 or three of those, one for each VM (which at the moment isn't possible since there is only one special connector for data stuff)
Why? You can passthrough current hardware. And they aren't like blades...
@@farmeunit more compact. To passthrough a network + some USB + disks you need a lot of cards (and slots) and this limits you to only have one or two, or go virtual for everything apart from GPU
@@marcogenovesi8570 So then you still need more slots, lol. One card with two NICs and a card with 5 USB and two USB-C, takes up the same a two of these. You can actually get 4-port NICs if you want. No need to passthrough disks. Have a separate datastore or use a NAS.
@@farmeunit How is 3 cards less slots than a single card.
Yes you can get the special 100$ quad controller usb 3.0 and a quad gigabit card and then passthrough a single USB controller to each VM, then do sr-iov for the gigabit card to have network, and then passthrough specific disks. But it's a lot more work than just passthough a single IOMMU group and all you need is in it.
I know you can use a datastore and virtualize everything that is not the GPU, I would just like to have a "blade" experience to this where for each VM I get a single card to run all IO
I think it's utility depends entirely on how many PCIe slots the upstream motherboards have - if they don't sacrifice motherboard slots through not having the second chipset on board then it would be great, if however there's x670 options that already have the extra slots and IO built in then it just seems unnecessarily complex since it has to go in a specific slot rather than being able to be used as a general purpose PCIe mux
Chipset daisy chain card would be an amazing expansion for a ton of people who want more ports
I honestly would consider it - this is an awesome idea, I hope it comes to fruition.
It sounds very interesting. A lot of it does depend on how much it costs for them to do this and how much they have to charge to turn a profit. People will pay a lot for cards adding m.2 slots or for 10GbE or to add IO to their computer so a single card that does all that seems like a win assuming the price is reasonable. One thing I would really want though is if this could be used in other systems as well. I would understand if some functionality wouldn't work but things like the additional IO it adds should be made to work regardless of the platform.
"Teh princess is in another castle.."!!!!!!!!!!!!
I bought that board. That is why I ended up here.
Thanks for the info!!
This is genious. would love the idea of an upgradable motherboard. especially when motherboards are getting more expensive.
I would be into this if it didn't specifically require motherboard support. I already have an X670E motherboard and would love to add 10gb ethernet, but have a hard time giving up one of the so few PCIe slot we get on consumer boards for just ethernet. A more general expansion card like this would make me much happier to give up that slot. Also still wild to me that at this point a $500 motherboard can come without 10gb ethernet, but it checked all the other boxes so I went with it.
That's why I love ASRock. While everyone else is thinking "Why?" they're thinking "Why not?" and making some awesome off the wall stuff.
It's a nice technology perspective, however I think it will eventually come down to the price. The price should not exceed that of a general X670(E) motherboard, otherwise you just could buy that board instead of the B650 with that add-on card.
This is so cool ! of course we would want more upgradeability.
Genius move, I hope it will be product someday. Buy a "cheap", but good enough motherboard then add TB and/or second chipset for extra connectivity if needed.
This is very cool. I think it could be great for desktop PCIe passthrough and that whole multiple gamers, one CPU thing.
This is really nice. I am amazed. Well done Asrock.
Wow, I'm just imagining this coming out next generation with pcie gen5 and thunderbolt. It would have enough bandwidth to do everything it's doing now and add in thunderbolt without bottlenecking.
I'd buy that
Seems like a great way to reduce costs too, but even if it was the same price or slightly more, I'd still get it so I can stagger my upgrades.
Gotta give it up Asrock's server division ... ever since they were stood up we've seen more hardware control reach the consumer level gear
I like it. It gives more USB, merceda port, I can put another NVMe drive, and 10 gig network. That sounds pretty nice. Especially if I would be able to put it in an x670. Just for the extra ports
ngl most of your guys's output goes over my head but i stick around because you have that propane and propane accessories vibe
Very nice idea, they should make this card with different connector options on the board
this would be KING for mini ITX builds.
This is how it used to be done. I remember getting extra hdd controllers, sound card, TV card, and wifi card. It might end up that way again with PCIe getting faster and faster. Eventually there's gotta be a point where having all those other devices on nearby traces crammed in together will end up causing problems or so many layers it'll be more expensive to integrate into the mainboard. So we would have both a GPU card and an IO card with a user selected chipset connected to a 16x PCIe 6.0 slot. Since it looks like CAMM could move DRAM sockets directly to the CPU package there'll be more CPU socket pins available for the CPU to run more PCIe.
CAMM is LGA without ZIF. CPUs use LGA-ZIF.
@@erkinalp I don't see why that matters? Ever see the size of a naked Pentium 2? There's no reason a BGA or LGA CPU package actually needs to be small if CAMM also serves to eliminate area used for SODIMM slots, or even integrated DRAM on the motherboard. CAMM sticks don't even need to be the large ones we see today thanks to higher density DDR5 DRAM as well. Even mobile devices could still integrate this since currently the CPU PCB is already on top of the mainboard PCB. There would merely be more overlapping area for the CAMM pins. Place the CAMM socket on the bottom of the CPU package and it can even place the DRAM PCB on the same vertical plane as the motherboard, reducing thickness of the device more than possible today but still maintaining the ability to upgrade DRAM.
I can see this appearing in a retro computing channel 20 years from now. "Is it cool? Yeah. Does it help? Not really."
Holy shit, its like a modern equivalent of a super i/o card from the early IBM days. Never thought I'd see a combined card like that in my lifetime, not new at least.
I like the idea and would like even just these kinds of consolidated multifunction PCIE cards.
Oh yeah, workstation. Those products rarely have the same level of outside connectivity compared to mainstream products. This chipset add-on should be pretty good for them.
I’d love a card like this, if it was usable by any board that’s at least on the AMD platform. Being stuck to say only one model kind of ruins me wanting it.
Is there a particular reason chipset expansion cards haven’t been more of a thing? Impractically expensive? Low yield? Licensing complications? Unidentified demand?
I would like to see an upper half in a lower half ATX motherboard. Have the upper half house the CPU RAM, x16 pcie slot, some rear IO, audio connection, and maybe m.2. The lower half would house the chipset, audio circuitry, and any IO expansion.
Perhaps Asrock can test the waters by putting this terrific version of the board and the epic expansion card up for a draw. I wouldn’t mind winning one. 😆
Brilliant, love the concept.
I really see potential in the small expansion cards.
Pay a little more for the B650+ mainboard and have the option to update it to an X670 at any time.
Mainly because the bottom slot is hardly used by normal users, but it could be problematic in the future.. because of graphics cards.
I would love an server like approach.
No chipset. Just the Soc.
And the user can add USB, SATA, 10G-Ethernet,...
How to make a server into a workstation? USB audio interface and GPU. Done, if you want to keep it in the server rack. If you want it next to your desk, add water-cooling
Yes we would like it, but with an option with or without 10Gbit LAN, for me 2.5G would suffice. But I would also like a breakout with 4x USB 2.0 ports (which the chipset should have) on an extra slot. Even a cheapo ALC897 on the same breakout should be an option, to have the possibility to make a virtual machine without compromises (2 people one maschine for example).
If they would do that for all boards, they could save motherboard cost to provide only the "basic" functions and include the card for all E variants. Would save time on the assembly line, would reduce stock keeping and if you need more of the E boards, just add the card and put a sticker on the box.
This is cool. Could you fit one card per VM? Now put a small GPU and soundcard in there with a displayport output to have GPU accelerated Desktop and it would be the perfect desktop virtualization card.
For some reason, this reminds me of upgrading L2 Cache, by populating or re-populating sockets on the mobo.
I don't know why, it's pretty different, but comments are good, so, this is what you're getting 😆
Yes, definetely Id buy this X670 expansion card.
Because my ADSL 10/1Mbit internet connection so damn badly needs it.
That's going to sell like crazy. Imagine it. All of that on a single pci-e card. Wow
Imagine having most of the backplane IO on a single expansion card that you can choose. That will reduce e-waste and enable much easier upgrades. But that is not what designed-obsoletence is all about.
I had the same idea, as AMD is using PCIe to connect the chipsets (well DMI at Intel is very PCIe-ish, but has some few magic packets). The problem here lays in the proprietary extra harness, which is also why the TB-EX expansions (from ASUS) are so vendor-and-model-locked, even that there are just few signals. Hope one day this closed approach will be gone.
I want this! It would be so great to have more upgrade options.
slimdell has gone mad with power
this is epic!
I'd most certainly buy this instead of just a regular 10gbit network card and get some extra features while i'm at it.
Yes please this would be amazing for up front cost savings to be able to get what you need later. especially if they came in different configuration for like an oops all sas, or m.2 gone wild, or even 4 5 10Gb ethernet with a 6th 100Gb to run as a an amazing router firewall combo. Also Another awesome option use this setup break out all the extra pcie stuff that a mini itx system could handle with this card and a riser cable.
AMD, make it standard that very bottom slot on your motherboards has to have an optional "chipset mode". And make all the boards in a similar way.
*top
Expand MB abilities as needed. Migrate your chipset from one generation to the next. Reduce e-waste, reduce unnecessary duplication of components. Back in the before times it was common to have ISA cards for IO, they would commonly be moved from computer to computer keeping the core motherboard costs low while allowing you all the ide and sound and comm ports or whatnot you wanted. I want a new open standards modular interface to populate the ITX backplate.
Overall cost is going to be the real kicker that would make it viable for anyone that "accidentally" bought a B650.
Is there anything this board can't do ? It overclocks, it has ton of usb, it's affordable, it has expansion and it look so mighty fine
Very cool, I didn't realize just how cool until this.
It's a great upgrade path for someone who does not want to drop all the cash up front for an X670 or who wants a particular brand that does not make that model, like how NZXT only makes B650E. Actually, the PCB for the N7 is built by ASRock so I wonder if this card would just work in the NZXT board?