With the launch of AMD’s latest X570 Motherboard lineup, PCIe Gen4 Technology also arrived in the market which doubles the bandwidth of the previous PCIe 3.0 Technology. The good news is that the PCIe 4.0 is backward compatible with PCIe 3.0 but don’t expect your PCIe Gen3x4 drives to run at Gen4x4 speeds in the PCIe 4.0 slot.
Since PCIe NVMe drives are far superior to SATA SSDs or HDDs, these have become the first choice for professionals. As the price of PCIe drives is decreasing substantially, professionals nowadays are opting for “all PCIe SSD” systems. Content creators love to have lots of physical partitions in their system to effectively manage their workflow but there are only a few motherboards in the market that can serve this need.
So, which motherboard comes with maximum number of PCIe Gen4 M.2 slots?
MSI MEG X570 Godlike supports a total of five M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 slots which is higher than any X570 motherboard could offer. Professionals who do Video Editing, Color Correction, Modelling, Music Production, etc. need a large number of drives to manage libraries and files instead of one single large capacity drive and they would love what MSI MEG X570 Godlike has to offer.
Not all five M.2 PCIe slots are integrated into the motherboard. Three PCIe Gen4x4 slots are integrated and the 2 remaining Gen4x4 slots can be utilized via the bundled add-in-card which MSI calls “XPANDER-Z Gen4”.
Unfortunately, the XPANDER-Z Gen 4 add-in card is not individually available in the market as of now. There are only a few MSI motherboards that come with this add-in card.
After Godlike, MSI Prestige X570 Creation motherboard comes up with the support for four M.2 PCIe 4.0 Slots incorporating two slots within the board. The other two slots are provided by the bundled XPANDER-Z Gen4 AIC.
