Question In response to the "Battle of the X670E Flagships" article.

[old_rager]

Hey Guys,

With respect to the following article wrritten by Joe Shields from the Tom's Hardware team in the past 24 hours (https://www.tomshardware.com/features/x670e-flagships-roundup), what I'm trying to determine is, if I go with only 2 x PCIe 5 NVMe's running in a Raid 0 config, and, I am able to install an as yet not made x16 PCIe 5 GPU, would the installation of separate x8 PCIe 3 raid card result in the x16 PCIe 5 GPU being dropped back to run at x8, or, would the GPU continue to run at the full x16 PCIe 5 rate?

I am trying future proof my build so that when an x16 PCIe 5 GPU does become available, I won't be sacrificing x8 PCIe 5 lanes because of the existence of an x8 PCIe 3 raid card that I currently use for my media server.

Any help here is greatly appreciated!

Dave.

 

[kanewolf]

Hey Guys,

With respect to the following article wrritten by Joe Shields from the Tom's Hardware team in the past 24 hours (https://www.tomshardware.com/features/x670e-flagships-roundup), what I'm trying to determine is, if I go with only 2 x PCIe 5 NVMe's running in a Raid 0 config, and, I am able to install an as yet not made x16 PCIe 5 GPU, would the installation of separate x8 PCIe 3 raid card result in the x16 PCIe 5 GPU being dropped back to run at x8, or, would the GPU continue to run at the full x16 PCIe 5 rate?

I am trying future proof my build so that when an x16 PCIe 5 GPU does become available, I won't be sacrificing x8 PCIe 5 lanes because of the existence of an x8 PCIe 3 raid card that I currently use for my media server.

Any help here is greatly appreciated!

Dave.

NVMe drives running in RAID0 is usually a bad idea. Frequently the tools like Samsung Magician can't access the drive for firmware updates, etc. Although the benchmark numbers may seem exceptional, real world performance is imperceptibly improved. I recommend against it.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I'll also advise against RAID0. There's no real reason to do it with NVMe SSDs when the human perceptible difference is virtually nil even between a SATA and NVMe SSD.

But to answer your question, it depends on where the PCIe slots are getting their lanes. If they're getting them from the CPU, then yes, it'll eat into the lanes that would've normally gone to the GPU.

 

[old_rager]

NVMe drives running in RAID0 is usually a bad idea. Frequently the tools like Samsung Magician can't access the drive for firmware updates, etc. Although the benchmark numbers may seem exceptional, real world performance is imperceptibly improved. I recommend against it.

Thank you for that. I never really contemplated the ability of applying firmware updates to NVMe's in a raid config!!! 😉

 

[old_rager]

I'll also advise against RAID0. There's no real reason to do it with NVMe SSDs when the human perceptible difference is virtually nil even between a SATA and NVMe SSD.

But to answer your question, it depends on where the PCIe slots are getting their lanes. If they're getting them from the CPU, then yes, it'll eat into the lanes that would've normally gone to the GPU.

From my understanding, the AM5 architecture provides 28 x PCIe lanes from the CPU to the system. These are apparently seen as the following table:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a4epI4uKUtbSCZbDt-jvKSI_E53xgRN5/view?usp=share_link

So basically, there are 16 lanes for a GPU. There are 4 lanes for an NVMe (and if you use a Gen 5 NVMe, you can get up to 16GBs transfer speeds). 4 lanes are used to connect to the chip set - which then leaves you with 4 lanes for whatever you like. I guess my question is, if you insert an x8 PCIe 3 card into the second slot - which should from a logical data saturation perspective only consume 2 of those 4 lanes, will this actually be the case, OR, because it is physically x8 PCIe lanes, does this then mean that either x16 then had to drop off x8 Lanes - which still mean I will have 4 PCIe 5 lanes available, or, will my PCIe 5 GPU continue to run at a full x16?!?

It would've been nice to get Josh Shields' thoughts, but unfortunately I couldn't work out how to add a comment to his article... 🤣