I'm upgrading to a super powerful new PC, primarily for gaming, digital art, and 3D modeling, but I'm a bit puzzled about the M.2 slots on my motherboard. I'm using the Gigabyte X870E AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ATX AM5 motherboard and planning to install three SSDs: a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB for the OS and two Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB drives. However, I'm getting an error that says, 'When the motherboard M.2 slot M2_2 (M) is used, expansion slot PCIe_1 (x16) will run in x8 mode.' This is concerning because my GPU, the Zotac GAMING AMP Extreme INFINITY GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB, is connected to that slot. I'm not entirely sure how to proceed, so any help would be much appreciated!
1 Answer
That warning indicates that if you use the M2_2 slot, it will reduce the performance of your GPU because it won't get the full x16 bandwidth—more like x8 instead. If you avoid using M2_2 and use M2_1, M2_3, and M2_4 instead, you should be good to go! PCPartPicker is just auto-assigning them, but you can switch them around to avoid that conflict.
Got it, thanks! So just rearranging the SSDs should fix the issue. I appreciate the clarity on that!