Check your PCI lane availability for both an M.2 SSD and a GPU simultaneously.
Check your PCI lane availability for both an M.2 SSD and a GPU simultaneously.
Hello everyone. I'm facing a tech challenge. My system is from 2014 with an ASUS Z87-C board and a 4770K i7 CPU that supports 16 PCI lanes. Right now, it only has a GPU connected. I want to add an ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 card in the extra PCI x16 slot—specifically for one or two SSDs. I'm worried because reviews say this card can handle up to 8 PCI lanes even with four SSDs, but I'm not sure if it will be limited to just 8 when only a couple are connected. In a 2016 article from Gamer nexus, they mentioned a small performance gap (about 1-2% FPS difference) between 8 and 16 lanes, but that seems outdated now. Should I switch to a smaller M.2 SSD like the X4 Mini instead? Or can I be confident my GPU won’t get a bottleneck even with just 8 lanes for the SSDs? Thanks for your help!
Each M.2 SSD designed for PCIe3.0 requires four lanes. Pairing two such SSDs at PCIe 3.0 will consume eight lanes. Remaining eight lanes will be allocated to the graphics card, operating it at PCIe 3.0x8.
Running at x8 PCI lanes could significantly impact performance for a 30 series GPU. While your 4th gen i7 4770K may already limit speed, adding more PCI lanes might not offset that bottleneck. You're likely thinking about balancing upgrade paths without overhauling the entire system.
either x8 or x16, not x12 matters depending on the games, and your GPU model is likely fine since you're using a 4770k. You'll probably hit CPU limits before PCIe speed becomes a problem. The slot probably uses lanes from the chipset, so it shouldn't cut your GPU's lanes even if you switch to the secondary x16 slot, but it only supports PCIe 2.0 x4 at most. If nothing is plugged in in the x1 slots, it should be x2 only.
1080p quality at 60 frames per second usually, with 4k occasionally.
I understand now. Appreciate you bringing it up. It seems the PCI SSD I mentioned is limited to PCI Gen 3 and 4. I might have to choose the mini version, which would cap my speed at around 500 MB/s. Perhaps a SATA 3 SSD would be more suitable at this point.
I appreciate the speed of NVME downloads and installs. It seems Devil's Canyon works with M.2 SSDs (https://wccftech.com/intel-z97-launched-...-included/). However, the card I need only supports PCI 3.0 and 4.0, not PCI 2.0. I haven't found any confirmation of 2.0 compatibility.