Check your PCIe lane availability before proceeding.
Check your PCIe lane availability before proceeding.
Your system has the capacity to support both GPUs and additional M.2 drives, but you need to check PCIe lane availability. The Ryzen 3 3700X and Radeon RX 5700 both require at least two PCIe lanes, while the R7 370 needs one. Your current setup should work if you configure the motherboard to allocate lanes appropriately for virtualization tasks. For future expansion, ensure your M.2 slots have enough lanes for the planned drives. Let me know if you need help with configuration details.
Use the 16x port and 8x slot, but you require a crossfire cable to connect the two GPUs.
The 16x slot with 8x uses a combined total of 24 PCIe lanes. You won’t need additional lanes for NVMe devices.
Sigh... opening the manual and understanding it seems quite challenging. The document outlines several technical details about slot configurations and compatibility. Page 17 explains the hardware layout, noting three PCIe x16 slots and two PCIe x1 slots. It mentions that inserting a second card in the second PCIe x16 slot would expand both slots to x8, allowing dual cards to function together in PCIe 3.0 x8 mode. This setup may cause slight performance drops in gaming but isn't a major issue. The third PCIe x16 slot supports PCIe x4, suitable for computing tasks and encoding, though virtualization might be affected by bandwidth limits. Page 18 warns about using a NVMe SSD in the second M.2 connector rendering that slot unusable, but a SATA M.2 SSD can be used instead. Page 32 and 33 provide further clarification on these points.
The setup doesn't require a crossfire cable. Crossfire also functions with cards placed in the PCI-E X4 port formed by the chipset. The CPU features 24 PCI-E lanes, divided as follows: * 4 lanes connect chipset to CPU * 4 lanes go to the first M.2 port * 16 lanes reach the video card slot (first PCI-E X16 port) The chipset enables splitting the 16 lanes into two groups of eight, meaning inserting two cards in the first two X16 slots transforms the first slot into an X8 and the second slot remains functional as an X8. It doesn't need to be a video card in the second slot—it can be a PCI-E X1 network card or an PCI-E X4 capture card. Any insertion changes the configuration: first slot becomes X8, second slot reaches full capacity. The chipset can also generate up to eight PCI-E lanes (though manufacturers may add more SATA ports and reduce lanes). Four lanes are allocated to the third PCI-E X16 slot OR the second M.2 connector (if you add an NVMe/PCI-E SSD, the slot is disabled as lanes are rerouted). Two lanes are assigned to the two PCI-E X1 slots. Refer to the manual on page 23 for the detailed diagram.