Question AN1500 speed on 4 PCIe lanes

[NukeFromOrbit]

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a WD Black 2TB AN1500 add-in-card for my rig but I made some mistakes. I thought my second full-length PCIe 3.0 slot was rated 8x but no it's only good for 4x. Meaning I can't get the advertised read/write speed from the card. That's not a deal-breaker though. My question is if when using just the 4 lanes will it have a speed comparable to a equivalent M.2 NVMe SSD? That should still be fast enough my use.

Another concern I have is about heat. Even though it has a built-in heatsink it runs hot at about 55C idle, and I now have to move it a bit closer to my video card which is an RTX 2080 Ultra, one of those 2.5+ lane monsters. I've seen screenshots of similar layouts but I'm a bit worried I might get overheating issues with with either the SSD itself or the SSD blocking the fan intake of the GPU. GPU temps have never been particulary bad before, I might throw in another case fan on the front to see if it helps at all.

Alternatively I could try to go through Newegg's and Western Digital's process for returning it and getting a refund. I don't know if thats worth the trouble however especially since chances are I'll probably be reusing this SSD in my next PC build.

 

[rgd1101]

x8 device on x4 meaning you get half the performance

 

[NukeFromOrbit]

As I understand it M.2 SSDs use only 4x though, so I'm wondering if even if down-rated in such a manner if peformance would be about the same as WD's equivalent M.2 SSD the SN750.

Performance of the SN750 (M.2 PCI 3.0 4x) is about 3400/2900 MBps while the AN1500 is supposed to do 6500/4100 on 8x but does this sort of thing scale linearly? Is 8x always double 4x performance.

Guess I need to make up my mind if I want to upgrade my PC sooner rather than later.

 

[CountMike]

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a WD Black 2TB AN1500 add-in-card for my rig but I made some mistakes. I thought my second full-length PCIe 3.0 slot was rated 8x but no it's only good for 4x. Meaning I can't get the advertised read/write speed from the card. That's not a deal-breaker though. My question is if when using just the 4 lanes will it have a speed comparable to a equivalent M.2 NVMe SSD? That should still be fast enough my use.

Another concern I have is about heat. Even though it has a built-in heatsink it runs hot at about 55C idle, and I now have to move it a bit closer to my video card which is an RTX 2080 Ultra, one of those 2.5+ lane monsters. I've seen screenshots of similar layouts but I'm a bit worried I might get overheating issues with with either the SSD itself or the SSD blocking the fan intake of the GPU. GPU temps have never been particulary bad before, I might throw in another case fan on the front to see if it helps at all.

Alternatively I could try to go through Newegg's and Western Digital's process for returning it and getting a refund. I don't know if thats worth the trouble however especially since chances are I'll probably be reusing this SSD in my next PC build.

NVMe is PCIe x4 so it uses only 4 lanes even in x16 slot.