Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master Review: A Pricey Performer

[hardyhack]

Is this still worth the price compared with others with WiFi?

 

[DerCribben]

Will this board allow you to run three M.2 NVMe drives in NVMe mode simultaneously? I'm thinking of buying this board but the reason I want to buy it is so I can run two 970 Pro 1TB, and one 970 Pro 512GB in the M.2 slots, and then run two 860 Pro SSDs and a big HDD in the leftover SATA slots (or two slightly smaller HDDs if there are 4 open sata slots with the 3 M.2 slots filled with NVMe drives).

FWIW, I'm planning on running an i9-9900k CPU, and a GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, but at the moment that's the only thing I plan to put in a PCIe lane.

 

[Crashman]

Will this board allow you to run three M.2 NVMe drives in NVMe mode simultaneously? I'm thinking of buying this board but the reason I want to buy it is so I can run two 970 Pro 1TB, and one 970 Pro 512GB in the M.2 slots, and then run two 860 Pro SSDs and a big HDD in the leftover SATA slots (or two slightly smaller HDDs if there are 4 open sata slots with the 3 M.2 slots filled with NVMe drives).

FWIW, I'm planning on running an i9-9900k CPU, and a GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, but at the moment that's the only thing I plan to put in a PCIe lane.

Gigabyte says you'll get four SATA ports available if all three M.2 drives have PCIe interfaces. You'll also lose two lanes from the x4 expansion card slot, but I'm assuming from your mentioned configuration that you weren't going to use that slot.

 

[DerCribben]

Gigabyte says you'll get four SATA ports available if all three M.2 drives have PCIe interfaces. You'll also lose two lanes from the x4 expansion card slot, but I'm assuming from your mentioned configuration that you weren't going to use that slot.

First off, thanks for replying, I definitely appreciate your help.

I'm having some difficulty finding where they actually say all three will be active at once as NVMe drives. I see it implied all over the place but I just don't want to end up with three M.2 ports that "sure you can PUT 3 NVMe drives in there, but only one, or two will run as NVMe at a time, the other(s) will get kicked down to sata".

Probably I'm scanning through the materials, spec sheets, and manual too quick to see. But where do you see it specifically state that you can run three NVMe drives at once?

Again, seriously, thanks for the help.

 

[Crashman]

First off, thanks for replying, I definitely appreciate your help.

I'm having some difficulty finding where they actually say all three will be active at once as NVMe drives. I see it implied all over the place but I just don't want to end up with three M.2 ports that "sure you can PUT 3 NVMe drives in there, but only one, or two will run as NVMe at a time, the other(s) will get kicked down to sata".

Probably I'm scanning through the materials, spec sheets, and manual too quick to see. But where do you see it specifically state that you can run three NVMe drives at once?

Again, seriously, thanks for the help.

I don't think your drives have an SATA interface, only PCIe. I'm not sure what protocols the chipset offers to NVMe drives in addition to their PCIe interface, but regardless of those you're connecting over PCIe. Hook them up, find out that only two of them are configurable as boot devices, and them come scream at me or something Or don't. Either way you're still getting your PCIe bandwith.

Another problem exists though: If your drives are fast enough to really need an x4 interface, trying to process the data from two of them at the same time will force them to share the x4 uplink between the PCH and CPU. So, the only way I can see that having three installed at the same time will give you any performance benefit is if you're simply tranfering data from one drive to the other. Any one of those three drives should be able to reach peak transfer to the CPU as long as the PCH to CPU link isn't overstuffed with data going to and from another device.

Putting aside the x4 performance limit of the PCH to CPU, you're still getting the capacity advantage of three drives.

 

[DerCribben]

I don't think your drives have an SATA interface, only PCIe. I'm not sure what protocols the chipset offers to NVMe drives in addition to their PCIe interface, but regardless of those you're connecting over PCIe. Hook them up, find out that only two of them are configurable as boot devices, and them come scream at me or something Or don't. Either way you're still getting your PCIe bandwith.

Another problem exists though: If your drives are fast enough to really need an x4 interface, trying to process the data from two of them at the same time will force them to share the x4 uplink between the PCH and CPU. So, the only way I can see that having three installed at the same time will give you any performance benefit is if you're simply tranfering data from one drive to the other. Any one of those three drives should be able to reach peak transfer to the CPU as long as the PCH to CPU link isn't overstuffed with data going to and from another device.

Putting aside the x4 performance limit of the PCH to CPU, you're still getting the capacity advantage of three drives.

I'll "kinda" be transferring data from one to the other. This is going to be a purpose built After Effects computer, so one NVMe drive is a dedicated Adobe cache, and the other two are for assets, and render output so as far as transferring stuff from one to the other, After Effects will be reading project assets from one and writing them to the other as a rendered clip. But the one that needs the most read/write speed is the cache for sure.

Thanks for the input Crashman, I'll let you know what I find either from eSupport or from my own experience.