ASRock 970 Extreme4

[thecooler]

Both motherboards use PCIe 2.0. But can these motherboard be updated/upgraded to PCIe 3.0 via BIOS update? Some said it depends on the motherboard chips. Thnks

[bahram_alinezhad]

Re: ASRock 970 Extreme4

No; PCI-E version is hardware related and a certain chip supports a certain version of it. Some boards may have a chip supporting PCI-E 3 but is not enabled until a newer CPU is installed. In this situation an updated bios may be required. I think this is not the case for AMD 9xx chips.

[thecooler]

Re: ASRock 970 Extreme4

No; PCI-E version is hardware related and a certain chip supports a certain version of it. Some boards may have a chip supporting PCI-E 3 but is not enabled until a newer CPU is installed. In this situation an updated bios may be required. I think this is not the case for AMD 9xx chips.

Thks for the reply. So do you mean both motherboard have a potential to be upgraded to PCIe 3.0? I think Im gonna get the 990FX Extreme 4, and I hope there will be an update to support PCIe 3.0.

[electric bill]

Re: ASRock 970 Extreme4

According to AMD the 970 chipset only supports PCIe 2.0.
AMD 970 Chipset

Bill

[bahram_alinezhad]

Re: ASRock 970 Extreme4

you don't need pcie 3.0 you will never need it all pcie versions are cross compatible

The above comment is true. An exception is for power standard of different versions in absence of external power sockets; E.g. if you have a card which is only compatible with PCI-E 2.0 (Afox AF6850-1024D5S1), it means that it needs a certain amount of power beyond PCI-E 1.0 standard while it has not external power sockets to compensate.
AFAIK There is not much difference in performance with even fastest graphic chips. So PCI-E 2.0 (or even PCI-E 1.0) should be good for all uses.