AMD's X570 platform: is it worth upgrading to a new motherboard?

With the release of AMD's X570 platform earlier this month, a whole raft of new motherboards are in the wild sporting exciting new features and purporting to best support new 3rd-gen Ryzen processors and RX 5700 series graphics cards. With those reviews now out, it's time to take a closer look at the features of the X570 platform and why you may - or may not - want to upgrade. We took a close look at the entire X570 motherboard lineup from AMD partner MSI at a recent press event, so we'll use their boards as the basis of our analysis here. So: here's what you need to know about X570, including what PCIe 4.0 is actually good for, how much power these motherboards actually draw and why you may be better off sticking with an earlier-gen motherboard for your 3rd-gen Ryzen build.

The obvious place to begin is on PCI Express 4.0 - after all, that's exactly where AMD execs spent most of their time when X570 was first announced. In short, the PCIe standard has continued to evolve in quite a linear fashion, with a doubling in per-lane throughput for each new iteration. Previous-gen PCIe 3.0 allows for 32GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth in each x16 slot, so version 4.0 provides around 64GB/s in the same x16 slot or 32GB/s in an x8 slot. This all sounds great, but what what is this extra speed actually good for?

While graphics cards seem like the obvious benefactors of any bandwidth improvements to PCIe, they're actually not really limited by the PCIe interface outside of a handful of largely synthetic scenarios. Instead, it's other devices, like PCIe-attached solid state drives and 10-gigabit network add-in cards, that will make the case for PCIe 4.0 for this generation. One of the first PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the Phison PS5016-E16, is capable of sequential read speeds in excess of 5000MB/s, in comparison to leading PCIe 3.0 drives which generally top out around 3500MB/s. Of course, these drives aren't substantially faster when it comes to game load times thanks to similar random I/O figures, but content creators working with Ultra HD footage may find the sequential speed increase alone worth paying for.

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