Biostar Unveils Its X570 Racing GT8 Motherboard: PCIe Gen 4, DDR4-4000 and Triple M.2
by Gavin Bonshor on May 13, 2019 11:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Biostar
- 7nm
- PCIe 4.0
- Ryzen 3000
- X570
- X570 GT8
- DDR4-4000
It what seems to be an inadvertent move, Biostar has released information about its upcoming X570 Racing GT8 motherboard ahead of AMD's unveiling of the new X570 chipset. This announcement highlights certain specifications surrounding the X570 chipset and the X570 Racing GT8 itself including PCIe Gen 4, and support for high speed DDR4-4000 DDR4 memory.
While there's an element of mystery around the full and final details of the X570 chipset on AMD's AM4 socket, the unveiling of the X570 Racing GT8 motherboard confirms that X570 will feature PCIe 4.0. All told, it looks like the X570 Racing GT8 has three full-length PCIe slots, with two fed by the CPU supporting x16/x0 and x8/x8 configurations, the third full-length slot fed by the chipset at x4, and three PCIe 4.0 x1 slots. Biostar is advertising the X570 GT8 to feature a 12-phase power delivery which is fed by a pair of 12 V ATX power connectors which consists of an 8-pin and 4-pin.
The seemingly accidental reveal is interesting as the official specifications notes support for DDR4-4000 which leads us to believe that the IMC on the impending Ryzen 3000 series processors will feature a stronger memory controller (IMC) than the previous 2000 series. This makes things interesting as we found AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect scaled well with memory frequency and with a higher standard surely to be set with the new 7nm manufacturing process, it could go one step further in regards to memory performance.
From the PDF file found on the official Biostar website initially spotted by VideoCardz, we know that the X570 Racing GT8 is ATX sized and will feature three M.2 slots PCIe 4.0 x4/SATA slots, with six SATA ports rounding off the storage capabilities. Design wise the board has a black PCB with grey printing and includes three buttons for power, resetting, with the function of the third button currently unclear. We don't know if the board has onboard RGB LED lighting, but we know that the X570 GT8 will have two RGB 5050 LED headers for users to utilize.
Also included is a Realtek ALC1220 8-channel HD audio codec which provides five 3.5 mm audio jacks and an S/PDIF optical output on the rear panel, as well as a single 1 GbE LAN port powered by an Intel I211-AT controller. For users looking to use AMD's Ryzen APUs, the rear panel also has a set of video outputs including a mini-DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI-D output. Due to the inclusion of the ASMedia ASM2142 and ASM1543 USB controllers, the Biostar X570 Racing GT8 will feature two USB 3.1 Gen2 ports (Type-A and Type-C) with four USB 3.0 Gen1 Type-A ports and four USB 2.0 ports. Users can expand upon this with an additional four USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports and four USB 2.0 ports through the board's front-panel USB headers.
As it currently stands, the availability of the Biostar X570 Racing GT8 is unclear given that the X570 chipset hasn't officially been announced by AMD at present; this also stretches to the pricing as no information is currently available.
Related Reading
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- AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen 'Matisse' Coming Mid 2019: Eight Core Zen 2 with PCIe 4.0 on Desktop
- GIGABYTE X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi-50 Motherboard Launched: Celebrating AMD's 50th Anniversary
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- Best Motherboards: Q1 2019
Via: VideoCardz
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Arsenica - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
4 DIMM slots in a mini-ITX board? I don't think sobill44 - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 = 32Gb/s?Should that be 64Gb/s?
Alexvrb - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
The jump in manufacturer suggested memory overclocking to DDR4 4000 is promising, but how useful it will be depends on how well the IF and Zen 2 scale. Right now RAM speeds give you pretty decent gains (as long as you keep latency relatively low) until around ~3000/3200 and then diminishing returns kick in.Still, having the capability is pretty handy, especially with higher speed RAM prices coming down. Some of the 3600 kits are pretty affordable now, and they may have room for a little more speed. We'll have to see how far the new chips scale, to see if it's worth it. Obviously APUs is a different story, but we won't see any actual Zen 2 APUs for a while longer.
HardwareDufus - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
If they launched with a Racing X570GTN mini-ITX board that would be awesome. I know space is limited, but if they could fit multiple M.2 Slots on the underside, that would be glorious. Dual HDMI 2.0 and skip the DisplayPort altogether would be desirable as well.abufrejoval - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
As nice as 16 cores and DDR4-3200 or more sound at first glance, it still makes me wonder if there will be any practical advantage apart from bragging rights.Overall DRAM bandwidth won't have increased more than 2x over DDR3/4-1600, perhaps less with wait states often keeping step with signal speeds, yet there are now 4x the number of mouths to feed.
If there was a choice of either putting another Epic CPU or 16GB of HBM RAM die on that Ryzen 3000 socket, I am pretty sure I'd go for the RAM rather than having 16 cores suck from a dual channel straw.
Irata - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
If it's not for you, go for the 6C or 8C modelslightningz71 - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
Something to keep in mind, they have doubled the L3 cache per CCX (according to every leak we've seen). So, a dual chiplet 12 or 16 core part would have two CPU chiplets, each with 32MB of L3 cache. That's a LOT of L3, and can do a lot to hide DRAM latency and reduce bandwidth needs in all but the most bandwidth constrained of benchmarks. I suspect that a 12 and 16 core Ryzen 3XXX chip will at the very least perform just as well, if not better, than the threadripper 1920/1950 in every task that isn't almost exclusively a test of memory throughput.Furthermore, there is an opportunity here for a motherboard manufacturer to alleviate some of the other constraints of the AM4 socket. There were three advantages of the Threadripper over the Ryzen AM4 products: Memory bandwidth, Core count, PCI lanes. Memory bandwidth is still going to be an issue for Ryzen AM4, but, supporting faster DDR4 AND the doubling of the L3 caches will help make up for a lot of that. Core count, especially as compared to first gen threadripper, will be a wash, and the cores on Ryzen 3XXX will be higher clocked AND support higher IPC in most cases. As for the PCIe lanes, having PCIe 4.0 allows a motherboard manufacturer to use a PCIe switch to convert all of the lanes coming from the processor, or at least the first 16, in to 4 8xPCIe 3.0 slots that are direct to the CPU and give them full bandwidth. For almost every possible task that most threadripper systems were put to use for, the combination of those 4 slots, plus the additional few slots that come from the chipset, which is now connected via PCIe 4.0, will more than cover their needs. Does the motherboard get more expensive, sure! You don't get those chips for free. But, it'll still be cheaper than the threadripper boards that are out there and will give you almost the same performance in almost every case you can think of.
There is SO much flexibility available in this platform, it just takes a willing motherboard partner to exploit it.
PC Crazy - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
Interesting with the 4000+ OC RAM and by that, finally moving from 3200+ MHz. But also cool they added on all three M.2 slots the passive cooler.BigMamaInHouse - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
If the new Zen 2.0 and X570 bards are OC friendlly- then AMD gonna get massive amout of free publicity from the OC community and world wide OC competition events that all cover to AMD after 10 years that only Intel was used.ballsystemlord - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
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