[1]

For those looking at expanding the SATA, NVMe, and/or the USB/USB-C capabilities of your system, the Lekuo SouthBridge Max PB65MX3 is an interesting creation that I have been trying out. The Lekuo SouthBridge Max puts an AMD B650 chipset onto a low-profile PCIe add-in card to provide all of the above without any bifurcation required. Given that it's an AMD B650 chipset, it also "just works" nicely under Linux.

[2]

It's not often I get excited about a PCIe add-in card or eager to review one, but the Lekuo SouthBridge Max PB65MX3 is an interesting take on providing more SATA, NVMe, and USB connectivity to your system by making use of an AMD B650 chipset. The SouthBridge Max provides four M.2 NVMe slots, four SATA 3.0 ports, two 10 Gbps USB-A ports, one 10 Gbps USB-C, and one 20 Gbps USB-C ports.

[3]

The four NVMe slots, four SATA ports, and four USB interfaces are on this add-in card using a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. So if making full use of all the capabilities of the device they will be bandwidth constrained in sharing a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. Similarly, it's PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 5.0 depending upon what NVMe SSDs you would be planning to use.

[4]

If connecting multiple devices to the SouthBridge Max, there is a 6-pin PCIe power connector on the card for ensuring sufficient power.

[5]

Even with PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth, it's an interesting add-in card for those wanting more storage devices and additional USB/USB-C ports. Best of all with using the AMD B650, the Linux support "just works" without any issues. The add-in card with SATA and NVMe drives attached worked without issue as did USB-A and USB-C. Via lspci it just appears as if there's an AMD 600 Series Chipset on the system. This is great given the well-tested state of the AMD chipset drivers on Linux rather than having to deal with other less-tested ASICs that may or may not have good Linux driver support or require additional out-of-tree modules/firmware. The SouthBridge Max works on Windows and macOS too.

[6]

The Lekuo PB65MX3 kit included the low-profile card, both standard and low-profile metal expansion slots, copper stands and screws for the NVMe drives, and a simple user's manual. The add-in card measures in at just 69 x 174 mm.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lekuo-southbridge-max&image=southbridge_max_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lekuo-southbridge-max&image=southbridge_max_2_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lekuo-southbridge-max&image=southbridge_max_3_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lekuo-southbridge-max&image=southbridge_max_4_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lekuo-southbridge-max&image=southbridge_max_6_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lekuo-southbridge-max&image=southbridge_max_9_lrg