I've had my MSI Tomahawk motherboard for a few years now, and I recently bought a Samsung 990 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD since one of my hard drives is failing. I'm also running two GPUs: one for my 144 Hz monitor and another to support my older side monitors. However, I've run into a problem. When I plug the M.2 SSD into the M2-2 slot, the bottom PCIe socket becomes useless. I've read online that the M2-1 socket should work with both GPUs, but I'm confused about how to set it up. I can get one GPU to function in PCIe 1, but I can't seem to get anything working in PCIe 3 when I have the M.2 SSD plugged into either M2-1 or M2-2. The manual says that M2-1 is connected to the CPU. What am I missing or misunderstanding?
2 Answers
It sounds like you've got a classic bandwidth issue. With all that hardware, it can be tricky since the PCIe lanes are shared between M.2, PCIe, and SATA on most B550 boards. You'll need to do some digging online for your specific setup, but just know that not everything will run at full speed at once.
From what I know, M2_1 is pretty independent, so you should be good to use it alongside PCI_E1 and PCI_E3 without issues. Just make sure that your setup is correct. It should theoretically all work fine together.
Yeah, I thought so too, but I've spent hours troubleshooting. I don't think it's a SATA issue since it's supposed to be independent. I'm also looking for posts similar to mine, but most people just keep one card in PCI_E1.