AMD is introducing PCIe 4.0 support with its 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs – its brand new 7nm Zen 2 processors announced over at CES 2019. But there’s an upside for those of you still rocking 1st Gen Ryzen chipsets, too. Even if you’re upgrading to the latest AM4 compatible chip from your 1st Gen Ryzen processor, according to insider reports, PCIe 4.0 bandwidth may still be available to you.

Thanks to AMD’s pledge to stick with the AM4 platform until 2020, you will be able to slot a 3rd Gen Ryzen processor into a motherboard intended for 1000-series and 2000-series chips with only a prerequisite BIOS update necessary. However, that doesn’t always guarantee you full access to the latest features, these are occasionally platform limited.

We expect AMD to launch the X570 chipset to accompany its latest Ryzen chips, complete with full PCIe 4.0 platform support. However, according to motherboard vendors, within testing they found that PCIe 4.0 ran without issue on 300- and 400-series motherboards. At least for the primary x16 slot, anyways.