[SOLVED] PCIe Question Related to Graphics Cards and NVME Drives

[sshuttle]

I am not entirely new to PC building but, haven't done so in 5+ years. Recently I decided to build a new PC and am looking over the Motherboard manual and get to the section on PCIe slots. This is all a bit new to me seeing the M.2 Drive slots being mentioned. I plan on using 2 NVMe Drives, 1 as a boot only drive, and the other as a gaming drive. I will also have an HDD drive for other files etc. Will I have an issue with performance for my Graphics Card.

Specs are:
Motherboard: ASUS Z790 Gaming WiFi 7
CPU: 14700k
NVMe Drives: 256 GB Gen 4 NVMe
2TB Gen 4 NVMe
GPU: ASUS 4070 Ti Super
HDD Drive: 4TB HDD

 

[kanewolf]

I am not entirely new to PC building but, haven't done so in 5+ years. Recently I decided to build a new PC and am looking over the Motherboard manual and get to the section on PCIe slots. This is all a bit new to me seeing the M.2 Drive slots being mentioned. I plan on using 2 NVMe Drives, 1 as a boot only drive, and the other as a gaming drive. I will also have an HDD drive for other files etc. Will I have an issue with performance for my Graphics Card.

Specs are:
Motherboard: ASUS Z790 Gaming WiFi 7
CPU: 14700k
NVMe Drives: 256 GB Gen 4 NVMe
2TB Gen 4 NVMe
GPU: ASUS 4070 Ti Super
HDD Drive: 4TB HDD

No. The PCIe lines for the NVMe under the top graphics slot come from the CPU. They don't reduce the PCIe to the graphics card.
The second NVMe slot comes from the chipset. It might limit the total number of SATA disks you can support. Look at page 1-10 of the manual.

 

[COLGeek]

The practical user-perspective difference in performance is nil. Honestly, I would ignore these limitations.

In your case, the (older?) 256GB SSD may not even be useful. Think about using the 2TB as the primary and add another, larger, SSD down the road.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums and Happy New Year, newcomer!

I'm assuming you went looking on page 1-7 and 1-8 on the motherboard manual;
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1700/Z790_GAMING_WIFI7/E23110_Z790_GAMING_WIFI7_UM_WEB.pdf?model=Z790 GAMING WIFI7
if so, the PCIe slots and the M.2 slots aren't shared. Likewise, neither of the SATA ports will be rendered moot if you populate all M.2 slots. In short, you can work with 3x M.2 PCIe4.0x4 based SSD's and 4xSATA based 2.5"/3.5" drives which will bring it up to 7 drives in total.

 

[sshuttle]

Welcome to the forums and Happy New Year, newcomer!

I'm assuming you went looking on page 1-7 and 1-8 on the motherboard manual;
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1700/Z790_GAMING_WIFI7/E23110_Z790_GAMING_WIFI7_UM_WEB.pdf?model=Z790 GAMING WIFI7
if so, the PCIe slots and the M.2 slots aren't shared. Likewise, neither of the SATA ports will be rendered moot if you populate all M.2 slots. In short, you can work with 3x M.2 PCIe4.0x4 based SSD's and 4xSATA based 2.5"/3.5" drives which will bring it up to 7 drives in total.

Yes, that is the section that I was reading. I was not/am not familiar with the idea of PCIe Bifurcation. Thank you so much for that explanation and welcome. I appreciate you helping out this amateur/newbie for sure!

Just to clarify though. Using the M.2_1 and m.2_2 NVMe slots, shouldn't have any negative impact on my GPU.

 

[sshuttle]

The practical user-perspective difference in performance is nil. Honestly, I would ignore these limitations.

In your case, the (older?) 256GB SSD may not even be useful. Think about using the 2TB as the primary and add another, larger, SSD down the road.

Thank you for the response. I typically, just out of habit, always preferred having my windows on its own separate drive, just in case I need to do a clean install of windows on the drive that I don't lose everything that I've done. I just like to keep everything partitioned on separate drives. I've had issues before many years ago where I had lost docs, pictures, etc. because I needed to do a clean install of windows. Thank you though. I plan on leaving the 3rd M.2 slot open for future expansion.