ASRock x870e Taichi faces USB4 performance challenges.
ASRock x870e Taichi faces USB4 performance challenges.
The main problem I'm experiencing is extremely slow USB 4 performance. I've used both the Ugreen USB4 NVMe and ZikeDrive USB4 NVMe cases. One has Samsung 990 Pro 4TB drives, the other Crucial P5+ 4TB. Tested with premium USB4 cables and the new Silkland USB4/Thunderbolt 4 certified cables. Only about 250MB/s write speeds in Windows copies and ATTO disk tests. Read speeds reach full 3.5+ GB/s. Latest x870e BIOS, 3.10 CPU, 9800X3D 1x 1TB Crucial T705, 3x 4TB Crucial T705. No other PCI-E devices; onboard audio disabled. System specs: MSI MEG Prospect 700R Case be quiet! Straight Power 1200 Platinum PSU ASRock X870E Taichi Mobo AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3D CPU Corsair Dominator Titanium 2x32GB 6000MHz MSI RTX 4090 Liquid Suprim. Edited November 14, 2024 by hoxlund
The latest 800 series boards now use a separate Asmedia USB4 controller instead of the older Intel Maple Ridge "USB4" solution, which is quite an update. In the last couple of years I've conducted several USB4 tests on AMD systems, but outcomes have changed a lot based on the drivers and cases used. The best advice would be to check if your boards have the latest drivers on their support page and experiment with another enclosure. It looked underwhelming two years back, and it might still be the case even with the new controller.
The tricky part is ASRock doesn't offer a driver for USB 4. It boots up fine with Windows 11 23h2 and 24h2 out of the box. I haven't noticed any ASMo vendors supplying ASM4242 drivers either. For troubleshooting, I used a brand new Windows 11 Pro with a fresh OS, no upgrades or old installations. Another curious observation: removing the GPU (4090) and using the built-in AMD display gives full write speeds. I’ll check the BIOS, reset everything, but using a separate GPU shouldn’t interfere with those four PCI-E lanes for the ASMedia USB4 chip.
Please clarify the expected speeds and whether you've tried it on different machines.
Same NVMe enclosures on the front panel feature a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port delivering 2GB/s read/write speeds. The front panel port feels sluggish for writes, even though the drives themselves support much higher speeds—potentially up to 7GB/s. Other systems perform as expected for their ports when connected, but this setup maxes out quickly. The issue seems specific to my USB4 ports on this motherboard.
No changes occurred after the load bios failed. It was installed in Windows, but USB4 transfers remained extremely slow.
Continued troubleshooting on the Asmedia 2464 USB4 controller chip within the NVMe enclosure yielded no results. However, the chip is now current. After some frustration and the imminent decision to return the motherboard, I need to activate "performance mode" and turn on write caching in Windows. It would be great if Microsoft communicated this more clearly. Device Manager – double-click disk drives, external drive, then Policies tab. Ensure "Better Performance" is selected and check the box for "Enable write caching on the device." Reran atto disk benchmark.