Question will i be able use this card in my bottom pcie 16 slot?

[Itsmegareth]

MSI XPANDER-Z GEN 4 2x M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe 4.0 8x Expansion Card

its £35 on ebay and wondering if it will work in the bottom 16x slot of my msi b450 tomahawk max? my main concern is the bottom slot is only 2.0 and there is no option to split it in the bios.

 

[Lutfij]

If you look through this manual;
https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/E7C36v1.3.pdf
pages 38 and 32, would mean you need an expansion slot with 8 lanes allocated to it.

Due to the slot on your motherboard, you'll only see a max speed of PCIe2.0 regardless of a PCIe3.0/4.0/5.0 SSD populating the card.

 

[Itsmegareth]

If you look through this manual;
https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/E7C36v1.3.pdf
pages 38 and 32, would mean you need an expansion slot with 8 lanes allocated to it.

Due to the slot on your motherboard, you'll only see a max speed of PCIe2.0 regardless of a PCIe3.0/4.0/5.0 SSD populating the card.

 

[evermorex76]

It would probably function, but only one drive could be installed. The motherboard doesn't support bifurcation on that slot nor does the card itself (which is why MSI doesn't just sell this card at retail and only includes it with certain motherboards). And of course that drive would only have PCIe2 x4 bandwidth, or 2GBps which will severely limit performance of any drive you put in.

A single-drive PCIe to NVME adapter is MUCH cheaper, though it won't be any faster. But that's better than using a SATA drive if you're just looking to increase storage but would like a bit better speed.