[SOLVED] Intel Motherboards and PCIe lanes

[bamajon1974]

I have a custom rig with an Intel Motherboard (Asus Rog Strix Z390-E) with a Intel Core i9-9900K Coffee Lake 8-Core, 16-Thread processor, a Samsung M.2. solid state drive, NVidia GForce 2080 RTX Ti XC graphics card and SoundBlaster AE-9 sound card.

I found out that the Intel motherboards have 16 pcie lanes. The soundcard fits in a pcie slot. So I have a graphics card, m.2. SSD drive and sound card all on pcie lanes. How many lanes does the soundcard and M.2. SSD drive take up and do they take away pcie lanes from the graphics card? Does this configuration affect the graphics card performance? Do I understand this correctly?

If I were to add a USB pcie expansion card, would that also degrade system performance?

Thanks!

 

[k1114]

The number of lanes depends on the chipset. The cpu has 16 and z390 has another 24 for 40 total lanes. The 2 pcie slots with metal on them go to the cpu so put the gpu in one of those and the other empty. Use the other pcie slots for anything else. Those slots use the mobo lanes. No other slots or ports share lanes so you could potentially fill them.

 

[bamajon1974]

Great. So just to clarify....one of the long PCIe slots has the graphics card, the other is empty. So as long as nothing is in the 2nd long PCIe slot with metal, then the graphics card can access all 16 lanes. The soundcard and add-on USB card which both fit in the short PCIe slots, use some of the MoBo 40 lanes and won't affect the performance of the graphics card, correct?

 

[k1114]

Correct.

 

[bamajon1974]

Got it. Thank you for your help!