I just happened to be checking on a BIOS update for my X299 Aorus Gaming 7 Pro motherboard and found that the new update unlocked the whole board. 4x PCIe X4 bifurcation is now possible and RAID functions without that forsaken VROC key.
This is a great thing but, intel is a little late to the PCIe party. AMD has shook up the desktop space with Zen2 and X570 along with THREADRIPPER 3 and the TRX40 chipset, which now has a X8 PCIe 4.0 pathway from the chipset and a total of 88 (72) PCIe 4.0 lanes. This is a massive upgrade when compared to X299’s X4 PCIe 3.0 DMI link to the chipset. So intel had to do something and I guess unlocking X299 is it. Another great so called freebee from intel is there new X299X chipset. These new X299X motherboards are more open for storage options. Look at the Gigabytes X299X Designare, which personally I think is a awesome board. I have Gigabytes z390 Designare and the options on that specific motherboard are unmatched. It has the option for a direct connection to the CPU through a X4 PCIe switch for a fully uncapped nVME RAID 0 configuration. Along with 8K60/4K120 video passthrough and dual Thunder Bolt 3 ports just to name a few. Though this new BIOS update for X299 has brought new life into my aging X299 motherboard.
On the point of X299 Designare. Yeah board looks awesome and on paper it’s really top notch. But… when you dive into nitty gritty things it starts to look much less interesting. Especially dual TB3 controller which shares bandwidth with many other useful features. By adding more and more devices you can render both TB3 channels useless and starved of any capacity to transfer data. Yes Intel is nowhere with these paltry 44/48-lane CPUs.
That’s far too many compromises on a workstation board, unless Gigabyte targets it at people which will never use SATA drives for storage and won’t “over-populate” PCIe slots.
In a way there is other much, much more expensive motherboard with similar problem. Talking of course about TRX40 flagship Aorus Extreme. If you use all SATA ports (again it’s workstation board) you lose the capacity of two M.2 ports which go into the chipset. On that front TRX40 Designare is far better choice. There are no compromises - nothing shares bandwidth with anything.
