Questions about PCIe and graphics cards along with NVMe drives
Questions about PCIe and graphics cards along with NVMe drives
I’m familiar with PC construction but haven’t assembled one in over five years. I’m now considering a fresh build and reviewing the motherboard manual, focusing on the PCIe slots. I’m planning to install two NVMe drives—one for booting and another for gaming—and also a standard HDD for general use. My GPU is an ASUS 4070 Ti Super. I’ll need to check if this setup will affect my graphics card performance.
Welcome to the forums and a joyful New Year to all newcomers!
If you checked pages 1-7 and 1-8 of the motherboard manual, you're on the right track.
The PCIe slots and M.2 slots are distinct, and filling out all M.2 slots won't make any difference.
So you can use 3x M.2 PCIe4.0x4 SSDs and 4x SATA drives in 2.5"/3.5" configurations, bringing your total to seven drives.
No. The PCIe connections for the NVMe under the top graphics port originate from the CPU. They don't decrease the PCIe bandwidth to the graphics card.
The second NVMe connection comes from the chipset and could restrict the number of SATA drives supported. Refer to pages 1-10 of the manual for details.
From a real-world user point of view, the performance gap is zero. I’d probably skip these restrictions.
In your situation, the (previous?) 256GB SSD might not be helpful at all. Consider starting with the 2TB drive and adding more later if needed.
Welcome to the forums and a joyful New Year to all newcomers!
If you checked pages 1-7 and 1-8 of the motherboard manual, you're on the right track.
The PCIe slots and M.2 slots remain distinct, and filling all M.2 slots won't make any difference.
So you can confidently use 3x M.2 PCIe4.0x4 SSDs and 4x SATA-based 2.5"/3.5" drives, bringing your total to seven drives.
Thank you for your reply. I usually, by habit, kept my windows on a separate drive just in case I wanted to perform a clean installation on that partition and avoid losing everything I had made. I enjoy having everything partitioned across different drives. I've faced problems before where I lost files because I needed to do a clean install. Still, thank you. I intend to keep the 3rd M.2 slot available for future upgrades.