[SOLVED] Multiple M.2 Drives Affecting Gpu Storage?

[joleske1738]

What's up guys, currently I have two hard drives and one m.2 sata rev III drive. I just recently purchased an m.2 nvme drive to act as my main boot drive. My motherboard (asus strix b450-f gaming) has two m.2 slots. What I am confused about is what it states on my motherboards support page, https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-B450-F-GAMING/specifications/. Under the note section, it says: "*3 When the M.2_1 Socket 3 is operating in SATA or PCIE mode, SATA6G_5/6 ports will be disabled.
*4 When the M.2_2 is occupied by M.2 device, PCIe x16_1 will run at x8 mode."
Does this mean that if I install my new nvme drive, my GPU will only run at PCIe x8 instead of 16? Note that my motherboard has multiple x16 slots, so I don't understand why there would be an issue with pcie lanes. If someone could confirm whether or not that installing the new nvme drive will affect my GPU's performance. Thanks in advance.
Specs -
Ryzen 5 2600
Asus Strix B450-f Gaming
Gtx 1070
WD Green Sata m.2
Wd Black HDD
Seagate HDD
750 w gold rated psu EVGA

(jocrispy225 from reddit)

 

[CountMike]

What's up guys, currently I have two hard drives and one m.2 sata rev III drive. I just recently purchased an m.2 nvme drive to act as my main boot drive. My motherboard (asus strix b450-f gaming) has two m.2 slots. What I am confused about is what it states on my motherboards support page, https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-B450-F-GAMING/specifications/. Under the note section, it says: "*3 When the M.2_1 Socket 3 is operating in SATA or PCIE mode, SATA6G_5/6 ports will be disabled.
*4 When the M.2_2 is occupied by M.2 device, PCIe x16_1 will run at x8 mode."
Does this mean that if I install my new nvme drive, my GPU will only run at PCIe x8 instead of 16? Note that my motherboard has multiple x16 slots, so I don't understand why there would be an issue with pcie lanes. If someone could confirm whether or not that installing the new nvme drive will affect my GPU's performance. Thanks in advance.
Specs -
Ryzen 5 2600
Asus Strix B450-f Gaming
Gtx 1070
WD Green Sata m.2
Wd Black HDD
Seagate HDD
750 w gold rated psu EVGA

(jocrispy225 from reddit)

PCIe slots can run in all modes, from x1 to x16 but it's sharing PCIe lanes with NVMe. I don't think performance of 1070 will be visibly affected.

 

[Maxxify]

Yes, your GPU slot will only run at x8 PCIe 3.0. However, that is more than sufficient bandwidth for a GTX 1070. I have run my GTX 1080 at x8 for quite a while now in order to run more NVMe drives - the difference in testing has been <1% FPS. If you don't believe me, both TechPowerUp and GamersNexus have done articles on the subject with a GTX 1080 and shown this to be accurate.

 

[joleske1738]

Yes, your GPU slot will only run at x8 PCIe 3.0. However, that is more than sufficient bandwidth for a GTX 1070. I have run my GTX 1080 at x8 for quite a while now in order to run more NVMe drives - the difference in testing has been <1% FPS. If you don't believe me, both TechPowerUp and GamersNexus have done articles on the subject with a GTX 1080 and shown this to be accurate.

Great to hear, looks like I will install my NVME drive. GamersNexus article shows same thing. Thanks to all.

 

[jrhansen]

You should be more than fine.

If you read som reviews on the newer AMD X570 Boards which spot PCie 4.0, its stated that there is not any current GPU's that use enough bandwith to even saturate PCie 3.0 at X16. They only use a rather small ammount of the total bandwith in x16 mode. I don't have any real numbers, but since you normally get a real good scaling in Sli or crossfire configurations, my guess is that even 2x RTX2070s would propably have more than enough bandwith in PCie3.0 at 8x.

You need to have some serious expansion card needs to even justify the price of an X570 boards 40 lanes total. And since you still only get 4 lanes for the top 3950x the X570 chipset is vastly overkill for todays hardware. Since you can get very well designed B450 boards that has vrms perfectly able to support OC on even a 3950x, the only reason I can see the reason for an expensive X570 board is if you absolutely need to have access to PCie 4.0 Nvme drives or network addin cards.

Not sure wether your Asus board has 1 or 2 M.2 slots. From what I have seen it's often the 2'nd M.2 slot that shares lanes with the Sata controller and/or the PCie X16 slots.

But like you, I really don't get the sharing of lanes is necessary. In my world, I can get why the older B450's do it, but its also true for the X570. If I were to buy one of these or the next gen Zen3 I sincerelly hope they start bosting some more Nvme slots, and just start dissing the Sata slots. Nvme SSD's is starting getting cheap enough for even budget builds. No reason to keeping Sata alive anymore now.

 

[Theresa N]

You should be more than fine.

If you read som reviews on the newer AMD X570 Boards which spot PCie 4.0, its stated that there is not any current GPU's that use enough bandwith to even saturate PCie 3.0 at X16. They only use a rather small ammount of the total bandwith in x16 mode. I don't have any real numbers, but since you normally get a real good scaling in Sli or crossfire configurations, my guess is that even 2x RTX2070s would propably have more than enough bandwith in PCie3.0 at 8x.

You need to have some serious expansion card needs to even justify the price of an X570 boards 40 lanes total. And since you still only get 4 lanes for the top 3950x the X570 chipset is vastly overkill for todays hardware. Since you can get very well designed B450 boards that has vrms perfectly able to support OC on even a 3950x, the only reason I can see the reason for an expensive X570 board is if you absolutely need to have access to PCie 4.0 Nvme drives or network addin cards.

Not sure wether your Asus board has 1 or 2 M.2 slots. From what I have seen it's often the 2'nd M.2 slot that shares lanes with the Sata controller and/or the PCie X16 slots.

But like you, I really don't get the sharing of lanes is necessary. In my world, I can get why the older B450's do it, but its also true for the X570. If I were to buy one of these or the next gen Zen3 I sincerelly hope they start bosting some more Nvme slots, and just start dissing the Sata slots. Nvme SSD's is starting getting cheap enough for even budget builds. No reason to keeping Sata alive anymore now.

SATA lanes are necessary for hard drives. It's still prohibitively expensive to get 10TB of nvme storage.