We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

AMD’s Ryzen 3000 X590 chipset exists, but it now goes by X570

Hidden code that hinted at a potential AMD X590 chipset may have been a red herring

AMD chipset

Hidden code that hinted at a potential AMD X590 chipset may have been a red herring. A reference to the high-end board was spotted with X570 BIOS code last week, portent of a new chipset to come. However, motherboard manufacturers now insist the X590 chipset codename is deprecated, and all its functionality instead shifted onto X570 motherboards.

Today’s top semiconductor companies utilise the same or similar naming schema. It’s no accident, either. Your rival has a B250 chipset, you create a B350 chipset – and so on and so forth. Each company vying to have the last laugh that’ll likely never come. As such, it came as no surprise to anyone that a potential X590 chipset was on its way, a high-end motherboard set to match Intel’s Z390 on desktop.

Yet according to Gamers Nexus, speaking with motherboard manufacturers, the X590 chipset was cut before it ever got the chance to stick it to Intel. The chipset was intended to be the top in the stack, and the first with PCIe 4.0 connectivity, with X570 offering cheaper, PCIe 3.0 connectivity. However, this would not come to pass, and AMD would instead shift X570 into the limelight and lop X590 off the top.

Not to worry, it’s only the branding that’s reportedly been changed. All the intended functionality of X590 made it safely into the X570 designation.

That includes PCIe 4.0, which will double the effective bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 and allow for greater SSD and I/O support from the limited number of lanes available on mainstream platforms today. This will also supercharge the x16 or x8 PCIe slot for improved graphics card bandwidth, although that’s unlikely to make much of a difference, if any at all, to in-game performance.

Read more: These are the best gaming monitors going in 2019

The references to an X590 chipset was spotted by ComputerBase last week. A tweet by the developer of the DRAM calculator for Ryzen teased further motherboard configurations, and later backed up by further confirmation within X570 BIOS code.

AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 3000 processors will be the first to support PCIe 4.0 in the client space, and, alongside AMD RX 5700-series GPUs and X570 motherboards, will complete the first PCIe 4.0 platform in the market. You’ll be able to get your hands on all of these, from CPU to GPU, from July 7, 2019.

Cheaper B550 and A520 motherboards will be produced by ASMedia later in the year. These are not expected to feature PCIe 4.0 support.

And while X590 won’t exist in the client AM4 space, this doesn’t rule the chipset from making an appearance, in name only, alongside next-gen 7nm Threadripper chips.