I'm considering getting the Asus ROG X870E Extreme motherboard and plan to install three M.2 drives: one PCI-E 5 (Kingston FURY Renegade G5 4 TB) and two PCI-E 4.0 (Kingston FURY Renegade 1 TB). I intend to use the additional M.2 card for the two PCI-E 4.0 drives. My main concern is whether these installations might cause shared bandwidth issues that could affect my GPU's performance.
2 Answers
Right! Even if M.2_2 is enabled but not used, your PCIEX16_1 drops to x8 mode. If both M.2_2 and M.2_3 are active, it can lead to more restrictions. But your current setup plan should keep the GPU bandwidth at x16, as long as you stick with M.2_1 and DIMM slots you mentioned. Just keep in mind, the chipset uplink is limited to PCIe 4.0x4, meaning it could bottleneck the drive's full potential, but that might not even be a big deal.
The Asus ROG X870E Extreme has some interesting quirks. If you plug in the M.2_1 slot and use the ROG Q-DIMM adapter for the additional slots, you shouldn’t have any bandwidth issues with your GPU. The PCIEX16_1 will operate in x16 mode while M.2_1 will run in PCIe5x4 mode. Just be cautious; adding drives into other slots could drop your GPU to x8, which is where the issues arise. It's a bit of a mess with the Crosshair boards, honestly.
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