Overseas vendors are selling custom AICs which feature AMD’s X870, X670, & B650 chipsets for increased expansion capabilities.
You Can Get More Expansion Capabilities On Your PCs Using These Custom-Made AMD X870, X670 & B650 Expansion AICs
Recently, several vendors in China have started offering expansion kits for PCs that feature AMD’s 800 and 600-series chipsets. These AIC (Add-in-cards) can be equipped to a PCIe slot, enabling far better IO capabilities than most traditional and entry-level motherboards.
As per a Bilibili content creator, the Oshwhub AIC is an open-source hardware platform that utilizes an AMD Southbridge, namely the Promontory 21 series or X870, X670, B650 series, and it can be used as a standard PCIe device on any platform.
Most of the expansion cards are made by AMD itself for testing and evaluation purposes. There are an ample number of these AICs that make it to the DIY market.
Each AIC is based on a B650 chipset, but other models offer X870 and X670 chipsets too. The difference between these is going to be the number of PCIe lanes, and USB capabilities, with the higher-end PCHs offering more expansion features than the entry-level B650 designs.
The AMD “B650 PCH PCIe 4.0 Expansion Card” has a B650 chipset featured undera tiny heatsink, makes use of a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, and carries four M.2 slots that are rated at PCIe 4.0/3.0 x4 speeds, four SATA III slots, and there’s also USB 3.2 support. These sell for 300 RMB or around $40 US in China.
There are also a few older X570-based Expansion cards that sell for 200 RMB or $30 US. These offer similar M.2 and SATA capabilities, but also add more USB Type-A/Type-C ports. Certain motherboard vendors, such as ASRock, also provide an Expansion Kit AIC with their products based on a similar set of AMD chipsets, further adding up to 10 GbE LAN support.
Another interesting thing that can be done with this AIC Expansion board is that it can be sort of daisy-chained for endless IO capabilities. Some boards come with an onboard PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, which can be used to connect the same board over and over. Though not practical, it is still an interesting capability that can be achieved with such expansion kits.
Image Source: Oshwhub
In terms of performance, the expansion slots offer similar performance as an onboard controller, with full M.2 Gen4x4, USB 3.2, and SATA III speeds as demonstrated below:
It is stated that before using the expansion cards, their firmware would need to be updated for them to operate properly. These expansion kits are really cool in the sense that they can offer entry-level Intel/AMD PCs with higher IO capabilities, and the sellers offer decent support in providing users with the respective firmware through social channels.
News Sources: HXL #1, HXL #2, Chiphell #1, Chiphell #2, HKEPC
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