B760 vs z790 pcie lanes
B760 vs z790 pcie lanes
Hello, your current setup uses an ASUS Pro Art B760 motherboard. I’m checking if it can support three NVMe drives—one Gen4 and two Gen3—plus a 4090 at full speed. You might want to confirm the board’s specifications for NVMe compatibility before making any changes. If you’re satisfied with the existing setup, you could proceed; otherwise, consider upgrading to a board that explicitly supports higher-speed NVMe drives.
The board specifications indicate 3 M.2 slots with multi-threaded performance. One slot draws power from the CPU while the other two come from the chipset. The B760 features a less efficient DMI connection compared to the Z790, but this difference is unlikely to impact most tasks since both use Gen4 X4 links on their respective platforms.
Only one NVMe drive can be used at once, and we need few USB devices. If you plan to add four PCIe M.2 slots later, it might not fit or could cause compatibility issues. Check the Z790 support before proceeding.
It won't work fully, at least if you don't use the top PCIe slot. The issue is just the PCIe lanes in in the PCIe slots other than the primary slot will be limited to x4 at the most, and because the 4xM.2 cards have no on board logic and just rewire the PCIe slot to an M.2 slot, they will only have the first M.2 slot work correctly. Z690/Z790 have the same restrictions, there just isn't a way to get a full 16 PCIe lanes to a secondary PCIe slot on LGA 1700. The only advantage Z790 boards have is that because of their extra chipset lanes, you're likely to get extra M.2 slots on the board itself, and some higher end Z690/Z790 boards (more Z690 than Z790 for some reason) have x8/x8 support, so you'd be able to run 2 M.2s in the second M.2 slot rather than 1 in the lower end boards.
They'll all show solid single-core speed, particularly with the latest Threadripper 7000 line—it's mainly due to their lower clock speeds, which means they won't match consumer chips in that area. Still, if you really want PCIe lanes, it remains a strong choice. On the other hand, it might be more cost-effective to invest in larger SSDs rather than switch to Threadripper just for extra storage.