Question Would installing an NVMe SSD on an H61 board cause PCIe lanes bottleneck for my GPU ?

[FeverDev]

I am upgrading to an i7 3770 from the i5 3470s. OLD? Yes, but I found some really great bargains and for the work and light gaming I do, it will suffice.

My current motherboard is a generic "Esonic H61FEL" which I am planning to give to my uncle (along with the i5 and 4gb ram) to use as a media home PC. Now, I am interested in buying this particular motherboard again from the generic "Esonic" brand. They work great, and I have no problems with them whatsoever!

ESONIC H61 Motherboard with M.2 NVMe SSD Slot, Supports 2nd & 3rd Gen Processor

www.daraz.com.np

So this "new" motherboard has a NVME slot which looks very tempting to buy. The problem is, would installing an NVME drive cut some PCIE lanes to the gpu? I have a zotac gtx1660 super. Would that result in a bottleneck and loss in gpu performance? It does have a PCIE 3.0 slot.

The new motherboard also has more bells and whistles compared to my old one like a faster gigabit Ethernet, USB3, 8pin EPS connector etc. ( and looks red and gamerry😂 too)

 

[boju]

Not much documentation that i can find to go on properly. Cpu has 16 pcie lanes so there isn't dedicated lanes like later cpus have so an Nvme ssd wouldn't eat into the graphics card lanes, but may not be the case here because there are pcie lanes from chipset as well.

Do you have the manual for this motherboard? It should describe what connecting an Nvme SSD will do, whether it halves graphics card lanes to 8x or maybe disables a sata port or two.

If installing Nvme does halve graphics lanes it won't really matter anyway, not with that graphics card and won't be missing out on anything with it's intended use purpose.

Besides there being no cables with M2, sata power and data etc, you'll see no benefit between Nvme or a typical sata 2.5" SSD. Practically, that might make your decision easier.

 

[Zerk2012]

I've never seen a H61 board that would support a NVME M.2 drive from a slot on the board.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Chances are no. The PCIe lanes would come from the chipset. And even if it used the GPU lanes, unless you're using a high-end video card, they don't lose much performance going down to PCIe 3.0 x8.

 

[FeverDev]

I've never seen a H61 board that would support a NVME M.2 drive from a slot on the board.

Well surprise surprise! These Frankenstein AliExpress Chinese boards do! The question is whether the NVME drive would eat up my gpu performance.

 

[FeverDev]

Chances are no. The PCIe lanes would come from the chipset. And even if it used the GPU lanes, unless you're using a high-end video card, they don't lose much performance going down to PCIe 3.0 x8.

I am using a 1660super. Maybe the lanes do come from the chipset. The read write speeds of a Gen3 (I think 3 or 4 not sure) drive having 3500mb/s read/write, ended up giving only half the speeds in these motherboards ( based on what I saw on YouTube).

They do have a jumper for sata/NVME mode on the motherboard though🤔, so I am curious if they disable all 4 sata3 ports and give the bandwidth to the single NVME drive.

 

[Zerk2012]

Well surprise surprise! These Frankenstein AliExpress Chinese boards do! The question is whether the NVME drive would eat up my gpu performance.

Good luck with even receiving a working board from them.
12 year old chipset and a new board is very rare.

 

[DSzymborski]

Well surprise surprise! These Frankenstein AliExpress Chinese boards do! The question is whether the NVME drive would eat up my gpu performance.

The question is how janky it would be. Frankenstein AliExpress boards are known for not doing what they claim or doing it in a messy fashion, especially with things that aren't normally a part of the chipset. There's a chance it doesn't work at all or if it does, there's some other caveat such as you're still unable to use it as a boot drive or their switch doesn't work properly and it disables the PCIE slot or something.

The smart move would just to buy a regular old SSD that uses SATA, which will be only slightly slower in real-world performance, and much superior in terms of hassle.

 

[FeverDev]

The question is how janky it would be. Frankenstein AliExpress boards are known for not doing what they claim or doing it in a messy fashion, especially with things that aren't normally a part of the chipset. There's a chance it doesn't work at all or if it does, there's some other caveat such as you're still unable to use it as a boot drive or their switch doesn't work properly and it disables the PCIE slot or something.

The smart move would just to buy a regular old SSD that uses SATA, which will be only slightly slower in real-world performance, and much superior in terms of hassle.

Yes, that would be a safe choice, but I was going to get a motherboard anyway and figured if NVME could provide me a much faster boot drive (would happily boot from Sata) and a working drive for my programs. I mainly edit open up lots of software for my game dev work so I thought that extra speed increase would be nice.

On the side note, would a USB3 to gigabit Ethernet add CPU overhead? Quite unfortunate that I am unable to utilize my full internet bandwidth with my current motherboard.

 

[FeverDev]

Good luck with even receiving a working board from them.
12 year old chipset and a new board is very rare.

Well it's not AliExpress, Esonic is a pretty popular Chinese brand here and they are pretty reliable. I am buying it locally from a retailer.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yes, that would be a safe choice, but I was going to get a motherboard anyway and figured if NVME could provide me a much faster boot drive (would happily boot from Sata) and a working drive for my programs. I mainly edit open up lots of software for my game dev work so I thought that extra speed increase would be nice.

On the side note, would a USB3 to gigabit Ethernet add CPU overhead? Quite unfortunate that I am unable to utilize my full internet bandwidth with my current motherboard.

In real world use, the difference between an NVMe and a SATA SSD is much, much smaller than between a SATA SSD and a SATA HDD.

 

[FeverDev]

In real world use, the difference between an NVMe and a SATA SSD is much, much smaller than between a SATA SSD and a SATA HDD.

That is interesting, would the read/write speeds bump (from 300mb/s to potentially 1500) be any beneficial to me ( opening up tons of programs and closing them, copying small files and maybe a little 1080p video editing (nothing fancy just editing some home videos).
If not, then I would just grab a reputed 500gb sata ssd and call it a day (already have a 256 gb one , very bad one).

 

[USAFRet]

That is interesting, would the read/write speeds bump (from 300mb/s to potentially 1500) be any beneficial to me ( opening up tons of programs and closing them, copying small files and maybe a little 1080p video editing (nothing fancy just editing some home videos).
If not, then I would just grab a reputed 500gb sata ssd and call it a day (already have a 256 gb one , very bad one).

I have 6x SSDs in my current main system.

All 1TB
980 Pro (OS and applications)
Intel 660p
4x SATA III

In daily use, it is hard to tell the difference.

Solid state drives get their benefit from the near zero access time. This is across ALL SSD types.

For video rendering, a test I did a little while ago:

The rest of your system has a MAJOR impact on what happens.

 

[thestryker]

There's no documentation available for that board unfortunately, but if I had to guess the M.2 is probably off of the chipset and would thus be PCIe 2.0 (it should still be 4 lanes) and not interfere with your primary PCIe slot lanes. There's also no guarantee you'd be able to boot off of the drive as that wasn't a feature during that generation.

NVMe only makes a notable difference if what you're doing can take advantage of the sequential speed improvement. It will be slightly lower latency, but real world this simply isn't noticeable.

 

[DSzymborski]

That is interesting, would the read/write speeds bump (from 300mb/s to potentially 1500) be any beneficial to me ( opening up tons of programs and closing them, copying small files and maybe a little 1080p video editing (nothing fancy just editing some home videos).
If not, then I would just grab a reputed 500gb sata ssd and call it a day (already have a 256 gb one , very bad one).

The big read/write bump comes from sequential reads/writes rather than random reads/writes. Day-to-day use tends to be a lot more of the latter.