Question Need help with decoding Gigabyte B550M DS3H information to support Gen4 NVMe SSD ?

ketrab

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Oct 27, 2008
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Hi, It's been a while. Looking to upgrade my *old PC and I wanted to run with Gigabyte B550M DS3H. Needs to be mATX.

I'm trying to run (3) gen4 NVMe SSDs at the 4x speed each but based on the specs I'm not sure If I'll be able to do that. I was hoping someone could help be decrypt the marketing bs and tell me if its doable?!

The board will run with 5700x (gen4 supported) so the first gen4 NVME should work at full speed via M2A_CPU. Based on their specs:
1 x M.2 connector (M2A_CPU), integrated in the CPU, supporting Socket 3, M key, type 2242/2260/2280/22110 SSDs:
  1. AMD Ryzen™ 5000 Series and Ryzen™ 3000 Series Processors support SATA and PCIe 4.0 x4/x2 SSDs
Now the 2nd and 3rd NVME I wanted to buy PCIE NVME adapter that can hold 2xNVME via PCIe Bifurcation. This board supposedly allows for the slit as follow (so I would assume I need to do 4x4?)

PCIEX16 Bifurcation
Allows you to determine how the bandwidth of the PCIEX16 slot is divided. Options: Auto, PCIE 2x8,
PCIE 1x8/2x4, PCIE 2x4/1x8, PCIE 4x4. (Default: Auto)

The PCIE NVME adapter would be placed on the first PCIE Express x16 slot which supports PCIe 4.0

1 x PCI Express x16 slot (PCIEX16), integrated in the CPU:
  1. AMD Ryzen™ 5000 Series and Ryzen™ 3000 Series Processors support PCIe 4.0 x16 mode
So I'm not sure about the split for the 16x PCIE since I know the adapter requires X4X4X4X4 or X4X4X8. Would that mean the PCIE 4x4 from the manual?

Alternative option would be to run x570 but there is not many mATX boards out there.

Thank you in advance for any help/guidance.
 

Eximo

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Are you going to use the second x16 (4x mode) for display? Perfect for an RX6500XT with its 4x lanes only.

Yes, 4x4 should work with a dumb M.2 expansion card.

A larger motherboard would make more sense for just 3 drives though. You can get that many M.2 slots pretty easily. Or really expensive Mini-ITX boards have daughter boards and stacks built in for multiple M.2 drives. Just depends on how you want to spend the money.

Check out DIMM.2 for example.