[SOLVED] Question about NVME Drives and PCIe Lanes on CPU

Apr 26, 2019
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I'm planing to buy NVME drive for the first time and I have a question
Can I use 2 HDD and 2 sata SSD drives and NVME Gen 3 x4 (Adata XPG SX8200 Pro) without dropping my GPU lanes from 16 to 8?
And if my GPU lanes drop to 8 x will I see any diference on my 1070 ti?
I have an Ryzen 2700x CPU and X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming mobo
 
Solution
Yes, you can. That board has 6 SATA headers and even if the use of an NVME PCI drive were to disable one of them, which it does not specify on the motherboard product page that it will, you would still have five remaining SATA headers to use. It would not affect your lane usage for the graphics card unless you were using two graphics cards, maybe. It does not specify that either, so it's possible that even then the available number of lanes to the second graphics card may be untouched.
Yes, you can. That board has 6 SATA headers and even if the use of an NVME PCI drive were to disable one of them, which it does not specify on the motherboard product page that it will, you would still have five remaining SATA headers to use. It would not affect your lane usage for the graphics card unless you were using two graphics cards, maybe. It does not specify that either, so it's possible that even then the available number of lanes to the second graphics card may be untouched.
 
Solution
I agree. There are relatively few situations where multiple graphics cards makes any sense anymore. Some, but few, and gaming configurations are generally not among them unless you have multiple 4k display arrangements or an Nvidia surround/AMD Eyefinity configuration with 1440p or higher resolutions. And then the gains from a second card are going to marginal to moderate where they work at all.
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Install the SSD to the M2A slot.

The bandwidth of the M2 ports are dependent on which cpu is installed, you won't have an issue with a 2700x.
M2b only runs at pcie2 speed.

Niether M2 slot takes lanes away from the CPU but your second x16 slot does share lanes with the main slot. If you install a card there your main slot will drop to x8 lanes.