Gigabyte Z690M DS3H DDR4: removing PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 the key to a good price?
There was news that (some) boards for Alder Lake using B660 chipset won’t support PCI Express 5.0. But it looks that may not be an actual limitation of that chipset, but rather something that will depend on pricing of each particular model. It turns out that even some Z690 boards will be like this. Gigabyte has a first such board, and it seems that these models might be the key to building an Alder Lake PC relatively cheaply.
This first board with the Z690 chipset but without PCI Express 5.0 support is from Gigabyte. It is the Z690M DS3H DDR4 model, so it is also one of the boards that are built to use the cheaper DDR4 memory instead of the new fast DDR5. This probably makes sense, as the goal of restricting the bus speed to PCIe 4.0 is cost saving, and DDR5 memory is also significantly more expensive today.
The Gigabyte Z690M DS3H DDR4 will probably be Gigabyte’s cheapest Alder Lake board yet. It is a mATX format model and the manufacturer states that it has a “Full PCIe 4.0 Design”. Owing to the fact that the main PCI Express ×16 slot for the GPU doesn’t have to support the 5.0 speed (4 GB/s per lane), a significantly cheaper PCB with cheaper components can be used. In particular, it reportedly has only four layers, which should be a significant saving.
The board otherwise has four slots for DDR4 memory and a VRM with 6+2+1 phases (50A per phase capable power stages are used and there’s a heatsink for cooling CPU phases, even though it’s tiny compared to more expensive boards). Two M.2 slots are present for SSDs with PCI Express 4.0 ×4 connectivity (one coming from the CPU, the other from the chipset). Then there are four SATA ports and two PCI Express ×1 slots, but these are only of the 3.0 type (1 GB/s per lane) so the slogan of “Full PCIe 4.0 design” apparently does not apply to them.
2.5Gb/s Ethernet, USB-C and legacy interface
Although this board has been stripped down to have a lower price, it has some pretty interesting features that could make it quite attractive. There’s a USB-C port on the back panel, though it’s only 10Gb/s (the 20Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 support in the Z690 chipset wasn’t utilised), and the other USB-A ports can only do 5.0Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 1. The video outputs for the integrated GPU are nice though: in addition to the old analog output, there are also two DisplayPorts and one HDMI 2.1, all three of these ports support resolutions up to 4096×2304 pixels at 60 frames per second.
The board also has 2.5Gb/s Ethernet from Realtek (probably RTL8125), which is again commendable. Unfortunately we don’t know what kind of audio is used, whether it’s already one of the better codecs like Realtek ALC1200 or higher, or whether the inferior and over a decade old ALC887 or ALCC892 was used. Quite interesting capabilities are also present in the headers on the bottom edge, where in addition to the favorite du jour RGB and ARGB LED headers, you will also find a header for the serial port (COM) interface. But better yet, there’s also a parallel port (LPT) header. So if you’re looking for a board for Alder Lake processors that can use these legacy interfaces, here’s your opportunity (admittedly, LPT and COM can also be added by an add-in card via PCIe ×1 slots, so this not such a rarity, an actual PCI slot would probably be a much bigger eye-catcher).
The PCB shows that there’s a spot for an M.2 slot for a wireless module among the ports on the I/O panel, so it is possible that Gigabyte will start selling a Wi-Fi version of this or a similar board. It’s hard to say if it will be globally available, sometimes these interesting cheaper models aren’t sold in our region.
The cheapest Z690 board?
As we already mentioned, this board could probably be cheaper than other models with the Z690 chipset, which have PCI Express 5.0 certification and a more expensive PCB because of it. But what exactly will its price in stores be, we don’t know yet. So whether it will really be a bargain and won’t end up more like “cheaper among the expensive”, we can’t tell you yet. Momomo_us, who pointed out the existence of this board, found it in a Swiss price list for the equivalent of about 181 $/160 EUR (note that this is including sales tax), while cheap Z690 boards with PCIe 5.0 nowadays start at more than 200 €.
Besides this model, there might be others with Z690 chipset, DDR4 and PCI Express 4.0 only. By omitting some of the more advanced functionality we noted, this model could logically be made even cheaper. Similar boards without PCIe 5.0 could also probably be released by other manufacturers, so there could be more choice among them.
Will there be a choice between PCIe 5.0 and 4.0 even with cheaper chipsets?
So it looks like PCI Express 5.0 is not a requirement on the Z690 platform at all, manufacturers can build a cheaper board that is only certified for PCI Express 4.0. The definite downside is that the consumer will have to check the specs when choosing a board if they explicitly require PCIe 5.0.
In light of this, it is possible that even in the cheaper category of boards with the B660 chipset, the lack of PCIe 5.0 support we wrote about earlier may not be a general rule. It is possible that it won’t be something Intel will not enforce in any way, and it will also be up to the manufacturer’s choice and consideration of manufacturing costs. So maybe eventually there will be some B660 boards where PCI Express 5.0 will be officially supported. Of course, then they will probably also see a price increase compared to counterparts with only PCIe 4.0.
Sources: Momomo_us, Tom’s Hardware
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš, original text by Jan Olšan, editor for Cnews.cz
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