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Surprise, surprise -- PCIe 3.0 was baked into AMD's 990FX chipset all along.Our CES video coverage continues with a tour of Asus' booth, where Deputy Editor Gordon Mah Ung captured on camera the company's E2KM1-L Deluxe mini-ITX motherboard (shown in thumbnail image). It's a replacement for the old E45 Brazos 2.0 boards, the big difference being a soldered on dual-core Trinity CPU. But the real surprise was still to come.
Sitting over to the side was Asus' new Sabertooth 990FX/Gen3 R2.0 motherboard. It has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from this caliber motherboard, and at a glance, it looks like any other slice of 990X silicon.
Unlike other 990FX boards, however, this latest Sabertooth features PCie 3.0 support. Yep, it looks as though AMD had PCIe 3.0 support in the 990FX chipset all along, though it hasn't been enabled up to now.
Unfortunately, existing 990FX board owners won't be able to enable PCie 3.0 via a BIOS update. Special hardware on the board itself is required.
Have a look:
Moving on from motherboards, Asus brought with it a PCIe-based solid state drive (SSD). Asus is keeping most of the details to itself, refusing to divulge the type of controller it's using, capacity, or price. Heck, Asus didn't even want us to film the back of the card.
We were allowed to film the front, however, spying a glimpse of the neat lookign shield. Asus also demonstrated the SSD running in a system, indicating that this is a real product. The card, which is intended for enthusiasts, is expected to be available in 3-6 months.
Take a look, andbe sure to check back often for more CES coverage and videos. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel at MaximumPCMag.
Comments are closed on this article
Dan102102
January 11, 2013 at 2:50pm
NOT AMD Chip....it is PLX Chip!
AMD is not Gen 3.....ASUS has added a PLX Technology PEX 8747 Gen 3 Switch/bridge chip to enable Gen 3. Smart idea....AMD should be promoting the idea to compete with Intel.
vrmlbasic
January 10, 2013 at 11:21pm
I guess I'll have to get a new motherboard down the line to gain access to PCIE3, when my need for it arises.
I don't want to end up with PCIE as I did with AGP back in the day concerning GPUs; I don't want to have my awesome GPU held back by a slow bus, especially if that bus is artificially slow, as it would be here. I have unfun memories of discovering that while my then-prebuilt PCs had an AGP slot, it was a 1/2 (or if I was lucky, 4)x slot, keeping me from maxing out the GPU.
limitbreaker
January 10, 2013 at 4:55pm
what a surprise, too bad this wasn't a hidden gift for me with my first gen sabertooth 990fx. still... i bought that motherboard figuring that having dual 16x pci-e2 negates the need for pci-e3 but it would have been nice. this also means that we're not looking at a new chipset in the near future which is good.
beta212
January 10, 2013 at 4:19pm
Damn it Asus, that was one crap thing to do, now we have to buy a 150+ new motherboard if we want to get pcie 3.0 support.
WretchedSoul
January 10, 2013 at 4:05pm
Yeah, in 3-6 months from now intel will whip out PCI-e 4.0 capable hardware.
Arnulf
January 11, 2013 at 7:08am
Ah yes, the elusive PCI-E 4.0 spec ... I bet they are going to pull it out of their arse, given that final specification hasn't been been formalised and isn't expected to be released for another couple of years (2015).
Intel only just introduced PCI-E 3.0 support with its Ivy Bridge line-up last summer.
As an Intel user I'm really disappointed to see mongoloids such as you giving the brand a bad name with your fanboism. Why don't you crawl back under your rock and STFU ?
ocnier
January 10, 2013 at 3:52pm
So it's there but you can't enable it, so you have to buy a new board. That's crap on the part of Asus.....
