AMD X670E Motherboard Bug Reduces PCIe 5.0 SSD’s to PCIe 1.0 Speeds
Motherboard manufactures claim it’s an SSD issue, while SSD manufactures claim it’s a motherboard related bug.
A key selling point for AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series processors and the platform was support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. However, some users with AMD X670E motherboards are encountering consequential problems with some PCIe 5.0 SSD’s. The issue at hand is the speed of PCIe 5.0 SSD’s being downgraded to PCIe 1.0 speeds, which dramatically reduces performance.
Affecting multiple users across multiple X670E motherboard brands, including Asus and MSI. Strangely, these users initially experienced normal speeds before encountering significant slowdowns. This issue also affects various drive, which includes but is not limited to, Crucial’s T700 & T705 SSDs. It isn’t specific to actual hardware either, engineers from Crucial have confirmed that the issue persists on various motherboards and drives. This finding suggests that the issue is with the platform itself or the way PCIe 5.0 slots have been implemented.
“We would like to inform you that we escalated your issue to our dedicated team for further investigation and they informed that the problem lies with the motherboard rather than the Crucial SSD,” state Crucial. “This behaviour has been observed across various motherboards from different manufacturers, and we were able to replicate it on our in-house systems as well.”
The issue is occurring when both the first PCIe 5.0 slot for graphics cards and the first M.2 slot with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface are populated. In this case the system encounters random crashes, with some users even unable to boot into Windows. The system does boot after several restarts, but it sets the M.2 PCIe speed to PCIe 1.0. Troubleshooting has shown that reverting SSDs to PCIe 4.0 speeds or using PCIe 4.0 drives can resolve the issue, but that undermines the advantage of AMD’s platform having PCIe 5.0 support.
Some MSI motherboard users have reported success after applying a BIOS update (version 1.0c), which seems to resolve the speed and stability issues. However, this fix is not universally successful as it requires motherboard manufactures to admit fault with their boards. Asus reportedly claims that the issue is with SSDs – not their motherboards.
