[SOLVED] Second NVMe SSD at the expense of GPU speed

[Coix]

Hi,

I am building a small ITX system on an ASUS ROG STRIX B450-I GAMING motherboard.
The mb has one x16 PCIe slot for the GPU, and 2 M2 slots for SSD.

I intend to use SSD drives in both M2 slots.
The mb manual reads that if there is an SSD in the second M2 slot (as it uses shared bandwidth), the GPU in the PCIe x16 slot will run at x8 mode only.

My question:
What GPU should I use here? What GPU can utilze the most and is limited the least by the 8x mode?
What piece of info should I ckeck in the GPU specs to see if it's a good match?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Koekieezz]

What GPU should I use here? What GPU can utilze the most and is limited the least by the 8x mode?
What piece of info should I ckeck in the GPU specs to see if it's a good match?

any gpu should be fine, as long as it fits your budget and the psu.

 

[hotaru.hino]

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pci-express-scaling/27.html

Even at PCIe 3.0 x8 (or PCIe 2.0 x16), an RTX 3080 loses around 4% on average. You'll be fine with putting whatever you want in there.

 

[geofelt]

Graphics cards of today are not impacted by pcie x3,x4 you would not notice any difference.
Here is an amusing video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA


Then, is there a good reason to add a second m.2 device?
Why not just increase the size of the C drive?
Do not chase fast pcie x 4 sequential benchmark performance on your C drive.
A single larger ssd will give you future upgrade options.
Do not chase fast pcie x 4 sequential benchmark performance on your C drive.
If the cost of pcie is a problem. Consider a sata device.
Above all, do not buy a cheap ssd with low end (or missing) cche controller.

 

[Koekieezz]

Even my 850 Pro (was, gave them to my fam pc)) and Klevv Neo N400 240gb is still more than enough for windows and premiere (also somtime make tempoary files there for important scene) on an e3 1240 v2 system.

if you think but you don't feel, then it's pretty much not important.

 

[Coix]

Thanks, guys, these answers were really helpful. The target is 1080p Ultra gaming, so I'm quite sure now that I will not experience any considerable performance loss in that GPU range.

And the thoughts about SSD's are also worth considering. I usually use the first SSD for the system, so that is smaller but with good random read speed. The second SSD is for my data/media files, it is usually bigger but slower. This is my first mb with two M2 slots, so my second SSD used to be 2.5" SATA. It is a habit of me to use two separate physical drives, but now you made me think about it.