Question PCIe 4.0? Can I use ASRock M.2 Ultra riser card with ASRock Z490 Taichi LGA 1200 board?

[midas51276]

Hey all, I now this tech is kinda new & there is some confusion over the specs, but I'm sure some of you wizards out there can clue me in? ;-)

I have an ASROCK HYPER QUAD M.2 CARD with Bootable M.2 RAID Support. It is loaded with 4 x 1TB Samsung EVO 980 Pro drives. I would like to put this in the 3rd PCIe slot (x4) on my mobo as a boot drive in RAID0.

I know PCIe 4 is supported on this mobo, but because its an intel chipset the new 10th gen i9 CPU's DON'T support PCIe 4.0 at the moment, but AMD does on its Threadripper CPUs.

I'm sticking with Intel, so do you think I can make this work as is with PCIe 3.0 or should I not use that riser card?

Thanks all, and stay safe out there.

 

[RodroX]

Hey all, I now this tech is kinda new & there is some confusion over the specs, but I'm sure some of you wizards out there can clue me in? ;-)

I have an ASROCK HYPER QUAD M.2 CARD with Bootable M.2 RAID Support. It is loaded with 4 x 1TB Samsung EVO 980 Pro drives. I would like to put this in the 3rd PCIe slot (x4) on my mobo as a boot drive in RAID0.

I know PCIe 4 is supported on this mobo, but because its an intel chipset the new 10th gen i9 CPU's DON'T support PCIe 4.0 at the moment, but AMD does on its Threadripper CPUs.

I'm sticking with Intel, so do you think I can make this work as is with PCIe 3.0 or should I not use that riser card?

Thanks all, and stay safe out there.

First thing: That card should work on PCIe 3.0, just don't expect the same performance as it was plugged on a PCIe 4.0 port.

Second: AMD Ryzen zen 2 (3xxx) support PCIe 4.0, you don't need to go with the expensive Threadripper line*.
Any X570 mobo for Ryzen (zen 2) cpus will have support for PCIe 4.0.

* The only problem I see is that I don't see this card support any mainstream motherboards, only HEDT ones.
At least that what the last page its manual shows: https://download.asrock.com/Manual/HYPER QUAD M.2 CARD.pdf

Same thing for the website: https://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/product.asp?Model=HYPER QUAD M.2 CARD#SupportList

Good luck!

 

[midas51276]

Thank you Mr Wizard. Seems like it should work but at PCIe 3.0 speeds. I think I just need to build my new rig now and test it, I can't find any definitive answer as to IF this will work or not. I will report back after I build and test.

1 more thing, whats the best/simplest tool to test the read/write performance once these drives are installed?

Appreciate all the help.

 

[RodroX]

Good luck with your build, that will be a very expensive PC considering none of the mainstream platform seems to be compatible with that riser asrock card.


I don't do much testing on hard drives, but theres CrystalDiskMark and AsSSD Benchamrk.

 

[grimfox]

Crystal Disk is the most common benchmark I've seen for drives. That's a neat piece of hardware.

 

[midas51276]

Thanks guys, I'll report back once I have this built, I'm still waiting on some of the components to come in. Basically I will build the following to see what the performance of the riser card will be:

ASROCK Ultra Hyper M.2 Card populated with 4 x Samsung EVO 980 Pro 1 TB NVMe Drives.
ASROCK Z490 Taichi LGA 1200 motherboard (above card in PCIe 3.0 (x4) (bottom PCIe slot) in RAID 0
Intel Core i9 10900K LGA 1200 CPU
64GB RAM @ 3600 G-Skill Tridentz

I want to see if I can get the card to work in RAID 0 using the onboard RAID controller from my mobo. If it does recognize the card then I should have a pretty fast 4 TB boot card, even if it isn't truly PCIe 4.0, only PCIe 3.0.

While I wait for the parts, anyone want to guess what the speeds will/should be?

 

[midas51276]

Well, that was bust! Unfortunately no matter what I tried, I could not get the card to recognize all 4 drives. Best I could get was to install Win10 on the single NVMe drive that did show up in the BIOS. Drivers and BIOS were updated. We seem to be right at the point between 2 standards, namely PCIe 4 and USB 4.0. Intel is way behind with it's implementation of PCIe 4 support on CPU's, you'll only really find support for it on Zeon CPU's right now. AMD CPUs offer much better PCIe 4.0 support.

I ended up giving this card to a friend who is ready to start a new AMD system build so I think he will enjoy it. Oh well, maybe on the next build...