I'm building a new system with two identical 2TB Gen4 NVMe drives. One will serve as my OS and application drive, connected directly to the CPU. I plan to use the other drive as a dedicated game drive, but I don't want it to take up PCIe lanes from the CPU. So, I'll have to put the game drive in one of the chipset-connected M.2 slots. Will this decision affect my gaming performance in any noticeable way? If there is a difference, what can I expect while gaming?
5 Answers
I have a similar setup, with one NVMe drive in the main slot and another in the chipset slot. I haven't noticed any difference in gaming performance at all. You should be good to go!
Drives won't really change the performance while gaming; they mainly help with load times. Any SSD, whether NVMe or SATA, will suffice for gaming purposes. The specific generation and connection type don't generally matter unless you're into specific workloads that require that extra speed.
Honestly, there should be zero noticeable difference in gaming performance. Most games have minimal load time differences between various drive types, from SATA to Gen5 NVMe. Unless you're doing heavy file transfers or video editing, you probably won't even tap into the high speeds of PCIe Gen 4 or Gen 5. For 98% of gamers, a SATA SSD feels almost the same as the fastest NVMe drives when playing games.
To give you peace of mind, there's a video that explains how various drive types affect gaming performance. You can check it out here: https://youtu.be/gl8wXT8F3W4?si=ALFPwGaxtVg6BEfq. Hope that helps!
There’s a slight technical performance loss since the chipset connection means the signal has to travel further, but the difference is negligible. Most games aren't even close to maxing out SSD speeds, so if there's any impact, it would be less than 1%. Don't stress about using the chipset slot—it’s perfectly fine.
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