Question Crazy Crosshair VII PCI lane questions.

Nov 1, 2018
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So I have an Asus Crosshair VII Hero (BIOS rev. 2304). It has an MSI Air Boost Vega 64 GPU in the 1st PCI slot, two 970 PRO 512 GB NVME SSDs', a 2700x processor, and some GSkill FlareX ram at 3200. All firmware is up to date and everything works well.
I have been running this for about ten months with only one of the 970 PRO NVME drives in the M2_1 slot up until recently when I splurged and got another.
The short of this is: I have believed forever that if there are two m.2 NVME drives installed in this motherboard the first PCI slot would be forced to x8 bandwidth, but it isn't, it is still x16.
I have reset the bios, reloaded Win10 (twice, once in a RAID0), removed the GPU and reinserted it.
GPU-Z shows it at x16, Radeon settings show the hardware is set to x16. I have done disk performance checks and they show the drives performing at spec transfer speeds, about 7000 read and 4500 write in RAID 0, and 3500 read and 2200 write in normal mode.
So yeah, it is acting a little crazy and I guess I should be happy but I keep thinking something is wrong.
I kind of wonder if one of the later BIOS revs changed the way the lanes are shared?
Any thoughts?