A small add-in card spotted in China puts an AMD Promontory 21 FCH chip onto a PCIe card
AMD’s higher-end X670E and X870E chipsets are built from two Promontory 21 FCH chips. Each chip takes a PCIe 4.0 x4 uplink and provides eight PCIe 4.0 lanes plus four SATA 6 Gb/s ports. Those SATA ports can be reconfigured on some boards as additional PCIe Gen 3 lanes. The end result, as described in the report, is a platform total of 12 PCIe 4.0 lanes and up to eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports.
An enthusiast in China reportedly installed this FCH add-in card into an Intel motherboard, mostly to see what would happen. System utilities such as AIDA64 reportedly misidentify the Promontory 21 chip on the card as the system’s main chipset. That can make the software view look like an Intel CPU paired with an AMD chipset.
Source: Chiphell
The TOPC Ultra9 285h is a top-tier NAS motherboard. It features 32GB of high-speed 8400MHz memory, dual 10GbE Ethernet ports, dual full-speed Thunderbolt ports, three Mini SAS ports, two full-speed PCIe 4.0 x4 slots, and one additional PCIe 4.0 x8 expansion slot.
Adding an AMD B650 bridge provides four more M.2 slots and four more SATA ports
Photos of the card show four M.2 slots, with two connectors on each side of the PCB, plus four SATA 6 Gb/s ports. The report claims at least two M.2 slots run at PCIe 4.0 x4, while the remaining slots may be PCIe 3.0 x4 and/or M.2 SATA modes that share resources with the SATA ports.
Source: Chiphell
Worth adding that we recently shared a similar project, which was a custom board designed by another enthusiast. Just keep in mind, that just because the board has PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage support, the main connector still limits the overall speed.
Source: Chiphell Forums via HXL
