Jan 29, 2020
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I've never set one of these up before so I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong here.

I just purchased a Samsung 970 SSD that supports NVMe. I placed it in the 3rd PCIe x16 Slot on my motherboard with ASUS's own M.2 x4 PCIe Adapter. I've installed the Samsung NVMe driver for the SSD and downloaded Samsung Magician to make sure the firmware is up to date and my BIOS is up to date as well.

It seems like I did something wrong or I have placed the adapter in the wrong PCIe slot. I will provide some screenshots of Samsung Magician.

Screen Caps

The reason I didn't use the on board M.2 slot is because I no longer have my motherboard's original box which had the M.2 stand/bracket to hold the SSD in place and apparently it's impossible to buy them online after trying to find one. ASUS did tell me that my motherboard was NVMe capable. Maybe it's not modern enough to have full performance? Is it because my CPU only has 28 lanes? Not really sure what the problem is here. Any help would be appreciated.

Motherboard Manual (With Pics)


Specs

Processor:
Haswell 6-Core i7-5820k 3.3 GHz
Video Card: EVGA 2060 Super
Motherboard: ASUS X99 Deluxe
Memory: Corsair 16 GB 2133 MHz
Power Supply: 750 W Gold EVGA
Monitor: ASUS VG248QE

New SSD: Samsung 970 Evo NVMe
PCIe Adapter: ASUS Hyper M.2 x4 PCIe Adapter
 
Solution
They are physically x16 but electrically x1. 28-lane CPU would have 24 lanes to three PCIe slots and I guess 4 more to the chipset for the rest, I'm not an expert on X99. If you want x4 PCIe 3.0 it has to be one of three fast ones.
Pg. 8 of the manual under "Expansion slots" should have the information you're seeking - two of the x16 slots only run at x1 PCIe 2.0.

Lanes

So im confused. Why are the x16 slots running at PCIe 2.0 x1 if they are PCIe 3.0 x16 capable? Does this mean they are not PCIe 3.0 x4 capable since that is what the NVMe would need?
 
They are physically x16 but electrically x1. 28-lane CPU would have 24 lanes to three PCIe slots and I guess 4 more to the chipset for the rest, I'm not an expert on X99. If you want x4 PCIe 3.0 it has to be one of three fast ones.
 
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Solution
They are physically x16 but electrically x1. 28-lane CPU would have 24 lanes to three PCIe slots and I guess 4 more to the chipset for the rest, I'm not an expert on X99. If you want x4 PCIe 3.0 it has to be one of three fast ones.

Hmm, okay. So I guess I'll try the other slots and see what happens? If not I think my mobo just doesn't even support it :/