3 or even 4 m.2?

[augustbernardo21]

i have an asus maximums xi hero , i am planning on putting 2 Samsung 970 evos in the dedicated m.2 slots one being 250 gb the other 2 tb , if i plan to expand in the future can i put another m.2 in a pcie slot? or am i stuck to sata?

 

[feelinfroggy777]

If you are not using a GPU then you should be able too with a m.2 PCIe adapter card. But if you are using a GPU you wont have enough PCIe lanes. Infact, with 2 m.2 and a GPU you will already be running the GPU at x8 vs x16.

 

[augustbernardo21]

i have a asus strix 2080 8g so x16 is a must , knowing now that dual m.2 drives would take away from my graphics performance im thinking 1 single m.2 and the rest sata ? is there any way to run 2 m.2 drives and still get my gpu to run x16?

 

[feelinfroggy777]

You have access to 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes. 16 lanes are provided by the CPU and 4 are provided by the chipset. So you can run 1 NVMe SSD and 1 GPU. The SSD will run on x4 and the GPU will run x16. That is your best configuration.

I would run the rest on SATA SSD. And honestly, for a gaming rig you wont see much benefit from NVMe drives. NVMe drives really shine when doing large file transfers that take place during processes like video editing. For gaming, you wont do large file transfers. Even downloading a game you will be limited by the download speed and not the drive.

 

[augustbernardo21]

thanks a bunch man im glad i looked into this before spending 500$ on an m.2 just to throttle my gpu